There has been a growing awareness during recent years that projects and policy interventions that are designed without an appreciation of gender-specific constraints and potentials among intended beneficiaries can yield outcomes that run counter to original goals. Contrary to the assumption that project benefits are evenly shared within beneficiary households, women do not automatically gain from development projects, even if they have been explicitly singled out for attention in staff reports. Indeed, it has become clear that gender sensitivity in project design and implementation can be crucial to project success, particularly if success is measured with gender-disaggregated indicators as opposed to household-level indicators.
Attention has, therefore, increasingly been paid to the key question of how to design agricultural projects that do not bypass women and allow them to share in the benefits of project implementation. There have been three main approaches to this task:
- the design of women-only projects;
- projects in which women as part of a more general target group are allocated particular resources through women in development (WID) components; and
- integrated projects in which gender issues are mainstreamed.
While sound empirical assessments of project impacts on men and women are still few and far between, there is a convergence of evidence in the broader literature that suggests that the day of "women's projects" is over. The search is on, instead, for successful dual-gender projects that foster successful economic growth in favor of all household members. This paper provides a brief overview of the experience of several international donors with these three types of projects. The review attempts to answer the question: What type of project intervention works best to facilitate income enhancement among poor rural women?
The paper has three main sections, following the introduction. The first section asks the question, Why have projects sought to focus on women — what is the theoretical basis for such narrow targeting? The next section reviews published and unpublished reports to examine donor attempts to encourage the economic advancement of women. The final section draws conclusions from such experiences and suggests one key area of focus in the future.
