Photo: Kim Beevers/Mercy Corps

Ignoring gender-based data can cause aid agencies to miss entire segments of people in need, and even cause harm.

In a crowded refugee camp in Eritrea, an aid organization documented hungry families who received a bulgur wheat distribution becoming healthier, with the exception of one particular group. Young men who came to the camp without their families were getting the same amount of the high-protein, vitamin-rich cereal, but were starving and, in some cases, dying.

How could this be? The aid organization discovered that the boys were eating the bulgur raw, which is completely devoid of nutrients the body can absorb. The reason: males don’t learn to cook in Eritrea.

While a person’s sex is a biological fact, gender is a socially constructed role. Not cooking the bulgur wasn’t a result of the boys being physically incapable. In their culture, and indeed in most cultures around the globe, women and men, girls and boys play different roles. While those roles often seem fixed, they are actually changing all the time, affected by a wide range of social, economic and cultural factors.

Nowhere are these differences starker than in each group’s ability to access resources and opportunities, with serious consequences.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, like tools and fertilizer, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent, which could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent. That could reduce the number of hungry people in the world by up to 150 million. The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts has published research showing that women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, but receive only 11 percent of the world’s income, and own only one percent of the world’s land.

Gender is everywhere people are, but we have to look for it to see it. The tsunami that hit Southeast Asia in 2004 did not discriminate as it swept away entire villages. But once data was collected, Oxfam discovered that not the expected half, but two-thirds of those killed were female, with up to 75 percent in heavily affected areas. While the reasons are simple—girls aren’t taught to swim or climb trees, their clothing is more restrictive, and they typically care for and tried to save extended family members—the consequences are dire. With a loss of female population after the disaster, those left had to take on more responsibility, and in many cases that meant becoming child brides.

Though “gender” isn’t just another word for “women,” females tend to bear the brunt of inequality, so many aid organizations focus efforts on that demographic specifically. Not knowing which segments of the population are most affected by disasters and chronic poverty and how aid programs affect them differently results in inefficiencies and waste. Sustainable solutions require that men and boys play key roles as partners, supporters, and advocates of the integration of women’s and girls’ participation in their communities.

Last year, the Feinstein International Center, CARE, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Tufts University set the stage for evidence-driven aid through a gendered lens. Their pioneering research, “Sex and Age Matter,” published in August 2011, makes a strong case for disaggregating data to ensure vulnerabilities, needs and access to life-saving services are understood so responses are effective.

Governmental, multilateral and individual donors are responding to the call. In December, President Obama signed an executive order, which launched the first-ever U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described it as “a comprehensive roadmap for accelerating and institutionalizing efforts across the United States Government to advance women’s participation in making and keeping peace.” The plan was jointly developed by the Departments of State and Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with guidance from the White House.

Achieving our objectives for global development will demand accelerated efforts to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment,” said Sec. of State Clinton. “Otherwise, peace and prosperity will have their own glass ceiling.

USAID also unveiled its Gender Equality and Female Empowerment Policy this March. This new game-changing policy requires that USAID consider requests for aid funding only if gender considerations are explicitly incorporated into the design and mission of poverty-reducing programs. As of March, all implementing partners are required to develop and report on indicators that measure specific gender equality goals for each activity.

Many large, cross-sector international aid organizations have long had programs promoting women’s empowerment, combating gender violence and discouraging child marriage. Some have even had gender integration policies in place for a decade. Yet few, if any, have succeeded in fully integrating gender across all programs from design to evaluation.

Working in war-torn regions around the world, the International Rescue Committee helps women and girls heal after gender-based violence, understanding that the trauma a survivor experiences affects her family and community, too. The organization has a strong advocacy arm that works toward advancing laws to prevent violence against women, and enforcing policies ensuring survivors’ access to care and legal justice.

Mercy Corps takes a different approach. Though the organization has long incorporated a gender lens into many of its programs, the catalyst that allowed the group to scale up was a private donor, Melissa Waggener Zorkin who is a Mercy Corps board member, Kristo Zorkin, and the global communications firm Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. The organization just launched a new internal initiative, which will build global team skills in understanding how gender impacts aid among its almost 4,000 staff members. Unique to their efforts is marrying “do no harm” with a gender approach—versus a women’s approach—across all programs.

CARE, which is well known for its bold multimedia campaigns to bring attention to women’s empowerment, has an across-the-board policy, and places a special emphasis on gender at the heart of all its efforts. In addition to producing collaborative research, the organization has developed a gender toolkit, which provides practitioners with methods and resources to use around the world, and a wiki to share what works and what doesn’t. Despite its success, the organization has acknowledged it still has a long way to go.

Disaggregating data is the first step in discovering who is not being reached by aid. But data without analysis is useless. Making sense of the numbers and using them to design smart poverty-fighting programs means those most in need won’t be missed or, worse yet—harmed—by aid.

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Critics say developed countries have broken promises for international aid. Photo: UK Department for International Development (flickr)

With cause for concern about the future of international aid amid the financial crisis faced by rich countries, some developing nations find microfinance playing an increasing role in fueling local growth.

At last week's 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, powerful advocates including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pressed for continued financial assistance from rich countries and better transparency for aid programs, according to the Washington Post.

But is "continued assistance" enough? Is it the kind of assistance that will lead to actual change? The European head of Oxfam International says the EU failed to take a leadership role at the summit, despite previous promises of aid allocation. Natalia Alonso says “donors are not on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals. In 2000, all rich countries recommitted to spend 0.7 percent of their national income as overseas aid by 2015, but a number of EU governments, such as Italy and Germany, are pretty far from this.” Oxfam found that amid the economic crisis, EU overall aid last year was just 0.43 percent of income, leaving a $65 billion shortfall to 56 poor countries.

It may signal more trouble for traditional international aid, the flow of cash or food aid transfers from richer to poorer countries. The economic crisis and criticisms of the summit leave the trajectory of aid in question.

As the world's wealth shifts to developing nations, some Western leaders want to be sure their aid is paying off. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that “leaders of emerging economies must ensure that they are able to attract high-quality, sustainable investment.”

World Bank president Robert B. Zoellick also points to this shifting paradigm, stating that “the time has come to envision a world “beyond aid” – a world where the shift is from the paradigm of charity to one of mutual economic benefit.”

One way in which some developing countries are expanding local markets in the era of questionable international aid is through successful microfinance programs. While the long-term solvency of some forms of microfinance are in question, other examples point to successes engineered by both developing countries’ governments and private local banks.

Government funded cash-transfer programs in Mexico and Brazil have been recognized as quite effective at reducing poverty and spurring local market growth, The New York Times reports. These programs provide small infusions of capital to low-income residents for both entrepreneurial and cost-of-living expenses, feeding local economies. Indonesia’s state-owned Bank Rakyat has successfully demonstrated similar results in recent years through a mixed savings-credit model, according to Elisabeth Rhyne in her article, “Five countries where microfinance works,” for China Daily.

Rhyne also highlights Bolivia’s BancoSol, a for-profit bank dedicated to serving the poor that operates within a strict regulatory framework. Competition among similarly modeled microfinance banks has spurred growth with low interest rates in Bolivia. Cambodia and Mongolia are two countries where replication of the Bolivia model has allowed microfinance banks to be “market leaders and innovators,” according to Rhyne.

In Columbia, where 96 percent of businesses are small, demand for microfinance has grown fast in the years of the global financial crisis, according to IPS news. Microfinance in Columbia “grew at a steady rate of 15 percent between 2007 and 2010," states a Visión Económica study. Small companies fuel demand for microfinance because "they generally do not meet the requirements set by commercial banks,” Jorge Varón, the manager of the development credit fund of the Colombians Supporting Colombians (CAC) programme, told IPS. And in a country with so many small businesses fueling market growth, this is a divergent route from typical aid pathways.

The financial crisis hasn't killed international aid. But it has people talking about what's next. Microfinance looks like a big part of the answer.

Erik Mandell is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont. He is currently pursuing a master's degree in public administration and global leadership at Portland State. Read his other contributions to Global Envision.