22nd October 2018: Integrating gender in cash programming from the outset of conceptualising and designing transfers is key to addressing marginalisation, a Cash Week event organised by the Cash Learning Partnership has heard.
There was a discussion at the Cash and Gender event, co-led with ActionAid, CARE, UN Women and the Women’s Refugee Commission, on how social protection systems can be gender-transformative in the long-term. The event, which Development Pathways technical team participated in, touched upon how it is not enough for governments to put in place cash transfers for women from low-income families in developing countries to enter and access the market.
Gender dynamics need to be addressed in implementation approaches and modalities. And whilst cash transfers can be an important element of gender empowerment, they will not achieve this on their own. Even if they are targeting women, cash transfer programmes are not automatically considered as having a gender perspective (as raised by Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona).
“Gender is in fact a powerful intersectional identity concept, which when well understood, should be used by implementers to operationalise overall equity objectives,” commented Anasuya Sengupta, a Development Pathways Senior Social Policy Specialist who has a strong focus on gender equity and social exclusion.
“We should not silo gender-sensitivity or responsiveness as assessment outcomes for monitoring and evaluation,” she said after the event. “Gender integration into programming will ensure that marginalisation and barriers to access experienced by different citizens is assessed at the start of conceptualising and designing cash transfer programmes. Concrete solutions can then be built-in to implementation approaches and modalities.”
Cash Learning Partnership papers on gender and cash are available here.