Catalog

Building Capacity in Gender Mainstreaming

By Jenny Thorsborne ( jthorsborne@adb.org ) and Sonomi Tanaka ( stanaka@adb.org )
Team Leader, Capacity Building of the Lao Women’s Union; and Social Development Specialist

A National Gender Action Plan will soon provide government agencies in the Lao PDR with a clear road map for gender mainstreaming at national, provincial, district, and village levels

The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) is one of five Asian countries—along with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Pakistan—to be classified as “a least developed country” in the latest Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme. The mountainous terrain, lack of basic infrastructure, ethnic diversity, low per capita income, and inadequate health and education services combined make for significant development challenges.

ADB is providing a technical assistance project to the Lao Women’s Union, a mass organization that has an extensive grassroots network of women members, to build capacity for addressing some of the challenges in the field of gender and development. The project started in July 2001 and has two components. The first component is assisting the Lao Women’s Union develop step-by-step guidelines for a National Gender Action Plan (NGAP). It is anticipated that an intergovernmental working group will use these guidelines to develop a full-fledged NGAP under the supervision of the National Commission for the Advancement of Women, the establishment of which has recently been approved by the Government.

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	“Too often, we see that projects for income generation only add to women’s work burden” Madame Bounmi, President of her local Party Organizing Committee, National Assembly Member, and Head of the Lao Women’s Union in Vieng Xai District

Through the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995, the Lao PDR committed itself to 12 key intervention areas to improve the status of women and achieve gender equality. However, up to now the country has had no coherent national operational framework on how to translate these into the Government’s development programs. The NGAP is expected to provide government agencies with a clear road map for gender mainstreaming at national, provincial, district, and village levels.

A series of meetings and individual discussions have taken place among the members of the intergovernmental working group on NGAP guidelines and the project steering committee. The revised guidelines will be submitted to the Government for approval toward the end of the project.

“This has not been an easy project,” says Thoumally Vongpachanh, Project Director at the Lao Women’s Union in Vientiane. For example, translating key concepts, such as mainstreaming, from English into the Lao language has proved extremely difficult.

In Lao, one literal translation of mainstreaming is “being absorbed or dissolved and disappearing”—quite the opposite to the intent of highlighting women’s issues and concerns. But the integration of gender concerns into development process is too important to allow the difficulties to get in the way. “The Lao Women’s Union sees these challenges as an opportunity for the country to arrive at shared understanding and awareness of key concepts and tools related to gender and development issues,” says Ms. Vongpachanh.

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The second component of the project is providing training on gender mainstreaming and gender sensitive planning for the Lao Women’s Union staff and key government staff at the provincial and district levels in three selected provinces. The training aims to raise awareness of the socioeconomic development challenges as faced by women and men and provide tools to analyze and develop solutions to these problems—with both genders participating in the process.

Madame Bounmi, President of the local Party Organizing Committee, National Assembly Member, and Head of the Lao Women’s Union in Vieng Xai District, is only too well aware of the difficulties facing women in this remote area of the Lao PDR.

“The burden of tradition is heaviest on women,” she said at a meeting with project staff in Houaphan province in April 2002. “Too often, we see that projects for income generation only add to the work burden. Women don’t need two jobs. We need to make their lives easier, not harder!”

Madame Bounmi is convinced that gender awareness training at provincial and district levels is a necessary first step toward achieving this goal.

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