Gender equality has long been a focus area within the Swedish international development cooperation. In 2008 the Swedish Government enforced this focus by introducing gender equality and women’s role in development as a thematic priority, in addition to democracy and human rights; and environment and climate. So far there has been limited information on how the thematic priorities are addressed. Against this background SADEV chose to conduct an evaluation with the overall purpose to assess how the thematic priority gender equality and women’s role in development is integrated in the other two thematic priorities - at policy level, in the implementation process and development of methods to facilitate integration.
On policy level gender equality is rather well integrated in the democracy and human rights policy framework. The environment and climate framework, on the other hand, has a rather weak integration of gender equality. However, within the environment and climate area a development can be seen over time from a fairly bleak discussion where focus was on technical aspects to a growing presence of social perspectives including gender equality.
At implementation level the awareness concerning integration of gender equality at implementation level is high among Sida operation officers and implementing partners within the democracy and human rights area. In the reviewed environment and climate interventions there is gender awareness among Sida operation officers, yet the understanding of how to address the issues is limited. Gender analyses are, both in democracy and human rights; and environment and climate interventions, in some cases undertaken, but the coverage and depth of the analyses vary. The evaluation finds that many of the interventions mainly focus on the number of women who participated in the intervention rather than on women’s active participation and influence in decision-making processes. The interviews revealed that dialogue is an important tool for integrating gender equality but it is not used in a systematic way.
The work on methods development for integrating gender equality in democracy and human rights; and environment and climate related interventions has so far been limited. Within the area of democracy and human rights a few projects have been initiated to work on methods development, and gender equality is often included as a component in these projects.
SADEV recommends the government offices (the MFA) to communicate the relation between the thematic priority gender equality and women’s role in development and the rights perspective, taking into account mainstreaming. SADEV also recommends that Sida develops qualitative indicators to facilitate integration of gender equality and women’s role in development as a thematic priority.
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