AID IS BECOMING MORE GENDER FOCUSSED

• Despite more than 60 years of long-term development projects, one reality remains mostly unchanged: rural women remain at the margins of development, particularly regarding access to productive resources and decent work. They bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid-carer work, such as child care, cooking, housework and collecting fuel, water or food. In Bangladesh, women complete nearly eight hours of unpaid care work each day (nearly three times what men do).

To try to address this imbalance, ActionAid is working in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ghana and Rwanda on a project called POWER. Elements have included establishing day-care centres for young children to enable women to work. Another key move has been to emphasise sustainable agriculture, using fewer pesticides and costly seeds in order to reduce overheads and ties to suppliers, and to plant crops more specific to the local climate and conditions. Other measures include helping women who grow crops to sell any surplus for better prices at markets traditionally dominated by men.

Local facilitators with whom ActionAid has spent decades developing relationships have been used. Following discussions with elders and other stakeholders, men in the community agreed to share more of the labour. Women were given the opportunity to plant crops, which had two benefits: it introduced more nutrition into the household and it enabled the women to sell the surplus at market, thus bringing in additional income.