BEIRUT: At the Middle East launch of the of the journal Gender and Development, U.K.-based editor Caroline Sweetman Friday asked local feminists for advice about how development programs should address their needs at the workshop “Beyond Gender Mainstreaming” in Beirut.
“We’re asking local feminists for advice,” said Sweetman, before a room of Lebanese feminists and civil society activists of different generations. She noted, “Bad work is rarely discussed.”
She added: “I want their perspectives because that will inform the direction and aims of the project. We want development organizations to be responsive to the needs of real men and real women in Lebanon who are living their lives.”
Sweetman is in Beirut this week for the Middle East launch of the publication and to host a workshop in cooperation with Collective for Research and Training on Development – Action. She encouraged participants to discuss the challenges to implementing successful development programs in the Arab world.
When the idea of gender mainstreaming was featured at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, there was much optimism surrounding this idea of introducing a pluralistic and holistic approach to development at all levels of society.
Since then, some feminists in the Arab world have questioned the idea of gender mainstreaming, or at least its implementation, saying that it hasn’t addressed their local issues, such as personal status laws.
“Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programs, in all areas and at all levels,” according to the U.N. Economic and Social Council definition of the term.
“It is a strategy for making women's as well as men's concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programs in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated.”
“We were in a state of euphoria in 1995,” said Mona Khalaf, former head of the Women’s Institute in the Arab World at the Lebanese American University.
“We thought we could achieve gender equality, but the mentalities haven’t changed … The discussions should be much deeper.” Instead, she said that most people continue with their habits, unaware of any problems.
But she urged her colleagues to be realistic, as she put it, saying, “Whether we like it or not we need them,” referring to large development aid donors, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Other participants suggested that Arab non-governmental organizations exercise caution over which organizations provide them with aid and to question their intentions.
Nadine Moawad, from the Beirut-based feminist collective Nasawiya, said: “It’s our job to influence funders. We forget that we’re owed this money.”
“When local solutions come without local analysis, at best it can be a waste of time and at worst it can be damaging,” said Lina Abou Habib, director of CRTDA and moderator of the workshop.
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