Gender Equity in Development

Women’s participation and empowerment in development is one of the major Millennium Development goals and has become an important ideal in a lot of development policy and theory, yet there has been little dialogue as to how gender equity can actually be implemented in practice.

Women centered projects, such as microcredit and cooperatives, create new assets and enlarge the amount of available resources to communities but often do not address control of existing resources. Genuine gender equity must take into account existing relationships as well as newly developed ones.

This course will seek to understand and recognize the various forms of women’s power, potentials for disempowerment in many development initiatives, and how we as practitioners can facilitate gender equity in community-based sustainable development.

The course will be highly interactive and will emphasize the sharing of experiences, ideas, and insights from participants. Participants will be encouraged to ground the ideas discussed by applying them to their own communities or development projects. This course will use case studies and readings to understand gender equity in development.
All required reading materials for the course are available online.

Upon completion of this course participants will be able to:

• Compare women in development vs. gender equity approaches
• Incorporate gender equitable methodologies into community development activities
• Design a gender equitable project for your community or project area

Testimonials from Past Course Participants for Gender Equity in Development:

“One thing that I have really stepped away from this class is the need to be purposeful in gender development. Before this class, the organization I work for always hoped that we would promote gender equality, but never specifically put it in our projects. Seeing the importance of specifically including gender equity in the planning is something that I will strive to change in my organization.”

“Over this course I realized a few things…NGOs have to start out with projects that have a focus of gender equality. It was shown from the readings that unless NGOs have such a focus, then gender equality can actually be worsened by ignorance or perhaps just lack of understanding. The NGO has to research about the communities and talk with the members to see their specific reasons for gender inequality, and also to see what their specific needs are. The goal has to be true gender equality, and not just the appearance of it.”