Africa bureau fragile states framework: Gender issues and best practice examples
August 2005
USAID
USAID’s Africa Bureau has developed a new Strategic Framework for the Agency and its programs in Africa that support US government foreign policy goals as articulated in the National Security Strategy (2002) and the State-USAID Joint Strategic Plan. The framework also aligns USAID programs with the “White Paper” U.S. Foreign Aid: Meeting the Challenges of the Twenty-first Century (March 2004). Agency programming will follow the guiding principles and programmatic approaches contained in these documents. For Africa, the framework makes a key distinction between transformational development countries (TD) and fragile countries (usually referred to as fragile states, FS).
TD countries are reasonably stable, and their prospects for developmental progress are good. Fragile countries (FS) have poorer developmental prospects because their governments cannot provide basic services and security to large segments of the population, often because of conflicts or crises hampering the state’s ability to provide services and the absence of an environment conducive to
growth. For both country categories, the framework offers opportunities to correct and refine program directions, reflect USAID’s awareness of the need to program differently in fragile states, focus programs for greater impact, and align program and management resources with goals. Since the framework represents a new way of thinking about development and programming in Africa, annual adjustments are anticipated over the next several years as experience grows.
This research was conducted to support the proposed new AFR gender policy to be contained in the framework by providing examples of how gender issues can be identified and addressed in FS.
Gender refers to a system of roles and relationships between males and females that is determined not by biology but by socio-cultural, political, and economic contexts. It refers to the “process by which individuals who are born into biological categories of male and female become the social categories of men and women through the acquisition of locally defined attributes of manhood/masculinity and womanhood/femininity.” In Africa, traditional “transformative rites” and other rituals from childhood to eldership have particular relevance; they shape the full range of changing patterns of social interactions, power relations, privileges, status and identities formed over time, usually based on age grouping, where gender may not serve as the primary organizing principle.
Liberation struggles, low-intensity intra-state conflicts, civil wars and genocide have occurred in a number of countries and regions of Africa over the past two decades. Further, several African states have failed as a result of these conflicts, or else become extremely fragile. Local peoples, governments, scholars, development practitioners and international agencies have created new policies, programs, and practices to deal with countries and parts of countries moving into crisis, in crisis, and recovering from crisis.
These two decades have also witnessed a significant increase in materials across media and organizations dealing with gender issues and ideologies and their implications for development. Specifically,
knowledge and analysis about gender issues and differences in these kinds of crisis and conflict situations has grown. Much of this new information addresses the roles of women. Gender issues and gendered programs, however, include and affect men, women, youth and children and the elderly of both sexes.
USAID’s policy is to mainstream gender, including gender equity, in all its programs. This includes programming in fragile states.
AFR has taken care to include gender issues in its Fragile States Framework. However, gender was initially treated as a programmatic sector, much like DG, Agriculture, or Economic Growth. Gender issues are varied and complex in peacetime, and change or may become rigidified in pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis situations. Thus, they vary across time and space, and are mediated by culture, ethnicity, religion and other country and region-specific variables.
This Gender Issues and Best Practice Examples addition to the original AFR FS Strategic Framework highlights some of the most common and pervasive gender issues at the various stages—pre-crisis, in crisis and recovering from crisis—enabling Agency and local partners to refer to them and to the related Africa Gender and Conflict Research Project materials in carrying out their own
assessments and designs.
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