G-RAP Engendering Programme

Significant progress has been made since 2005 when women’s rights, advocacy organizations, and gender experts raised concerns about the program being gender blind. Some of the concerns raised were as follows:

• the criteria for selection of Research and Advocacy Organizations (RAOs) was discriminatory because it tended to favour mainstream organizations with big budgets to the neglect of modest RAOs (most GE/WR turn to fall within this category),
• the threshold of 400,000 for core funding was criticised as being discriminatory as most modest RAOs could not meet this requirement.

There was also concern about the absence of ’Gender‘ as criteria and also the lumping of advocacy and research as one criterion.

Following these legitimate concerns, G-rap commissioned a gender analysis of the programme in 2006 identify gaps and make recommendation for the integration of Gender into the institutional mechanisms, implementation procedures, research programmes, monitoring and facilitating a process of making G-RAP more responsive to the needs of gender focused RAOs and networks. The feedback on the analysis from RAOs, the Project Management Team (PMT) and development partners was favourable and the consensus from the RAOs mandated a cross session of RAOs to constitute a Gender Steering Committee (GSC) to facilitate the engendering of G-rap.

The GSC accomplished the following

• Revised G-RAP Assessment tools to include gender indicators;
• carried out capacity building for RAO gender link persons and set up gender structures for engendering RAOs;
• enhanced gender and women rights groups access to G-rap funding and activities;
• made gender an essential part of G-rap activities;
• improved women’s representation in G-rap governance systems;
• enhanced women’s representation in G-rap governance systems;
• enhanced PMT and RAOs commitment to gender equality;
• and instituted gender guidelines for sustained engendering of G-rap.

The engendering process has been successful and some of the successes are as follows:

• A draft gender policy has been formulated, the purpose of which is to guide processes and provide a working framework
• The Gender Link Persons have been meeting to work with the Action Learning Sets.

A number of surveys have been conducted to find out how far RAOs have gone with the engendering processes. There is recognition that RAOs understand the need to engender: some have developed their own gender policies, others have reviewed existing policies and gone ahead to train their staff.

In moving forward with the current PMT to sustain and strengthen research and advocacy work in gender equality, it is important to consolidate the gains made under the engendering programme; work with RAOs to clarify what gender application principles are going to be implemented and how they seek to engender their RAOs. Provide a forum for Gender and Women’s Rights advocacy groups as well as mainstream RAOs to take stock of the gains of the gender movement in Ghana, especially as it relates to the implementation of the Women’s manifesto; and also for gender and women’s rights organizations and other development actors to identify and prioritize the challenges of women and children; and continue support for the development and sustenance of Gender Links person role, Research and sharing forums.