Browse by Theme: Gender Equality

“He always came home late and drunk and he often kicked the door open while hurling insults at me and the children. I became such a miserable person.... After a number of curriculum sessions, I started to notice a change of heart in my husband, he started taking responsibility for the family needs.... He even went ahead to open up a joint account for us.” (Quote by a project participant – but not from Olive who is pictured above.) Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common form of violence against women and girls – but our Indashyikirwa project in Rwanda proved there are ways to change this: by supporting couples to build healthier, more equitable relationships, and by helping communities to challenge and address the values which normalise violence.

Published on behalf of the Women 7 movement:

We are entering the final stretch before the G7 summit, which will open on 24 August in Biarritz. In September 2018, before the UN, the President of the French Republic Emmanuel Macron announced a 2019 G7 with a renewed format, focused on the Sahel region and on the fight against inequalities, and he called for women’s rights to become a “great global cause”. Only 10 days away from the summit, what has been done so far is not enough.

The example of Minakshi, a former child bride who has gone to become an activist and community-level facilitator for CARE’s Tipping Point project, is a reminder and inspiration for all development workers that real change is personal. We cannot work on projects seeking to shift harmful social norms without ongoing self-reflection around our own attitudes to gender and power, write Tirzah Brown and Yuleidy Merida.

Gender inequality is a major driver of poverty and a major obstacle to sustainable development. It’s also a key determinant of exposure to climate change risk: women and girls are more vulnerable to climate change impacts. So if we want to reduce this risk, reduce poverty, and promote sustainable development, adaptation projects and programmes must not only address gender-based vulnerability – they must seek to be gender transformative. What can we learn from good practice examples of programmes where gender equality outcomes have been sought and secured?

This year’s theme for International Women’s Day is #BalanceforBetter – a call-to-action for driving gender balance across the world. Working for CARE’s humanitarian team, we know all too well the very specific challenges facing #BalanceforBetter in life-saving emergency response, write Isadora Quay and Howard Mollett.

Schoolkids in Benin started hosting plays and events to talk about the dangers of child marriage, and community leaders listened. Leaders are now 26% less likely to actively promote child marriage than they were at the beginning of CARE’s TEMPS project. Success like this gives us hope for the future—we can stop child marriage for everyone.

Co-authored by Rebecca Haines, CARE Senior Governance Advisor; Tam O’Neil, CARE Senior Gender Advisor; and Emily Brown, Oxfam Gender and Governance Adviser.

For many development professionals, political economy has become the gold standard of foundational analysis for programming. It helps us to understand how power and resources are distributed in a society or sector and is important for ensuring our programmes and campaigns avoid cookie-cutter technical solutions and are designed for real world impact.