CGIAR Research Program on Grain Legumes Integrating Gender Research: Some ideas Esther Njuguna-Mungai 1

The Gender Requirement… 2  Gender integration is a requirement of most, if not all, donor agencies currently  Increasing need to show ‘realized value’ for the vulnerable members of society/target communities, mostly identified as women, children,.., youth  Most organizations, projects designing the ‘gender strategy’; Nations adopting ‘Gender Policy’…  There is an urgent need for ‘methodological’ development to support the need for research in gender

What is not gender research and analysis… 3  Scientists ambushed by the ‘gender requirement’? 1.Women in meetings, teams (numbers, exploitative?) 2.The ‘gendered’ anecdotal evidence…. 3.Comparison of women headed and male headed households 4.The ‘gender paragraph’ syndrome…  Necessary but not sufficient…….

What is gender research and analysis? 4  Women’s and men’s concerns are integral to the design of program  How a program implementation affects norms as well as gender relations; or how norms and gender relations affect a program?  How would a program implementation strategy change to accommodate the issues in bullet 2 above  Data collection, monitoring and evaluation that keeps tracking the men’s and women’s responses to the implementation of the program  Transformative approach….

Gender in the CGIAR system… 5  11 Common Intermediate Development Outcomes (IDO)  5 th IDO is on ‘Gender and empowerment’  Meeting in Cali in May for the gender coordinators to suggest indicators for the IDO 1.Women’s control over resources relative to the men 2.Women’s participation in decision making relative to the men  Expectations for all CRPs to show their contribution to the common IDO  CRP is tracking gender data that is relevant for contribution to the common gender IDO.

Status of Gender Research in CRP-GL 6  We have a gender strategy  We have a gender specialist  We have a gender budget  We have ‘gender studies’ in some of the research activities, implemented to different levels of satisfaction….  Can we give data on ‘gender and empowerment IDO’ when reporting to the CO?....

What we can we do as a team… 7  Formulate/re-formulate ‘gender research questions’ …  Allocate resources to implement ‘gender research’ in all the research activities  Minimum standards in collection of sex disaggregated data in household survey  Strategic research 1.Strategic gender research questions 2.Strategic research questions where gender is integrated

Gender integration in the KARI McGill Food Security Research Project Gendered objectives Gender strategy Orphan crops and indigenous chicken: Women’s enterprises 2/3 gender balance in farmer groups and project activities Gender disaggregated prioritization Training and farmer-to- farmer learning Monitoring and evaluation of impacts Specific studies focusing on gender issues Women’s access to land, customary rights vs. constitutional rights (PhD Study) Case studies on women’s empowerment through the indigenous chicken enterprise (gender stream) Women’s management of informal pearl millets seed systems from generation to generation (PhD Study) Informal and formal financial habits of women in smallholder households (MSc Study) Women’s and children’s nutrition security among households in Semi Arid Kenya (Nutrition stream)

Minimum standards in collection of sex disaggregated data in household survey 9 How does the income composition of rural households influence preferences for, and adoption of, new agricultural technologies for smallholder farms? Interview a household… ____________________________________________ Defining the unit of the analysis for the study to be the ‘individual decision makers’ (man, woman in the household);  understanding the individual choices, preferences and decisions for the man and the woman requires that you interview the individual man and woman in a household.  Understand what happens when the ‘preferences are matched, preferences are not matched’ between the man and the woman in the household, how the choice is then negotiated, who carries the day in technology choice/adoption (power shifts)  What are the factors that would cause the outcomes to go in one direction or the other (income, education, social networks)…

Strategic gender research questions 10 The gender and agriculture network has designed a study: ‘a global study on gender norms, agency and innovations in agriculture and Natural Resources Management’ Cascading it to Grain legumes ‘a global study on gender, norms, agency in management of grain legume seeds in the SAT’

Conclusions…. 11  Gender may have been a donor requirement, but there are a lot of concrete food security and development outcome gains that arise from our incorporating gender questions and focus in our work  Lets keep asking the ‘who question’…..each research project is unique  Gender research is still evolving, and its implementation is a continuous negotiation…each project activity taking a unique design  Gender implementation strategies for research activities with support from the gender coordinator

THANK YOU 12