Synopsis
More than 50 percent of the world's active violent internal and regional conflicts are in Africa. These conflicts have directly or indirectly affected over 75 percent of the region's countries and populations, conscripted over 300,000 child soldiers, displaced over 30 million people, caused over one million deaths, destroyed social and economic infrastructure, damaged the environment, weakened institutions of governance, and generally impeded equitable and sustainable development. When rebuilding conflict-affected societies, it is necessary to develop and support measures for strengthening the governance, security, justice, economic and social institutions, and capacities of the population. This task is particularly daunting in a post-conflict setting. It is essential to draw on the assets, experiences and dedication at the local level and among all sectors of society. War and conflict affect men, women, boys and girls.
A panel will present findings of a state-of-the-art survey of best practices and lessons learned on gender and peace-building, conflict and post-conflict societies in Africa that can serve as resources for managers and practitioners designing and implementing projects in conflict-affected societies. Findings come from research conducted to provide Africa Bureau missions and partners with guidance for responding to USAID's new Africa strategic framework. The framework focuses attention on fragile states in Africa and ways to avert, mitigate, or resolve conflict through building capacity of partners and institutions and using indigenous methods.
Notes
Afia Zakiya, Ph.D., Gender Advisor, Africa Bureau, organized the eighth and final 2005 USAID Summer Seminar, Gender and Conflict in Africa: Best Practices, Resources, and Lessons Learned. Presenters included Alice Morton, Ph.D., Consultant, Management Systems International (MSI); and Jackie Vavra, Project Associate, MSI. The session summarized best practices for developing gender-sensitive assistance programs for countries vulnerable to, in, and emerging from conflict, and highlighted recent mission resources created by the Africa Bureau.
Zakiya introduced the session topic and the Africa Bureau’s new Strategic Framework that will guide USAID programs in sub-Saharan Africa. The Strategic Framework classified countries in sub-Saharan Africa as either fragile or transformational states. Many of these countries were either engaged in conflict or emerging from it, which prompted Zakiya to start a review of the best practices for dealing with gender in pre-,post-, and in-conflict societies. MSI assisted Zakiya and the Africa Bureau in the production of four USAID mission resources that were on display during the seminar: Africa Bureau Fragile States Framework: Gender Issues and Best Practice Examples; Best Practices: Gender and Conflict in Africa; Gender and Conflict in Africa: Annotated Bibliography; and Resource Guide: Gender and Conflict in Africa.
Jackie Vavra began by defining the effects of armed conflict on women and children in Africa, and then discussed a “gendered approach” to reconstruction in Africa. Conflict uniquely affects women and girls by increasing their vulnerability to physical and sexual violence. Crimes against women such as rape may go unpunished because of weakened government and legal institutions. Increased incidents of sexual violence lead to higher rates of infection for HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as additional unwanted pregnancies. The destruction of hospitals during armed conflict exacerbates these conditions, as in Angola where civil war destroyed 70–80 percent of the country’s health care facilities. Additionally, armed militias increasingly recruit young women: up to 40 percent of child soldiers in some African countries are girls.
Women are also vulnerable after hostilities have concluded. Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs frequently do not recognize women soldiers and thus fail to meet their specific needs. Training and educational programs that overlook women and girls need to be adapted to better serve them. Vavra cited the example of the Barefoot Bankers project, which provides business management training but initially received marginal female participation. The project adjusted their approach by hiring a female ex-combatant to help target potential women beneficiaries through door-to-door outreach work.
War and conflict also contribute to a redefining of gender roles, which Vavra defined as “a system of roles and relationships between males and females that is determined not by biology but by socio-cultural, political, and economic contexts.” During and after conflicts, women generally assume greater economic responsibility since up to one-third or more of working-age males may have been killed. This can create the opportunity for women to acquire leadership skills and greater awareness of their political rights. Vavra highlighted the example of the Federation of African Women’s Peace Networks, whose members have initiated dialogue with governments and intergovernmental organizations promoting peace in many sub-Saharan countries.
Vavra then proposed ways of incorporating indigenous knowledge into a gendered approach for conflict prevention and resolution. Furthermore, she defined indigenous knowledge as forming “the basis of local level decision-making, and embedded in community practices, institutions, relationships, and rituals.” A gendered approach “attempts to heighten awareness of the particular and changed circumstances that war and conflict create for the construction and reconstruction of gendered roles in a society.” A project in Central Africa successfully incorporated indigenous knowledge by using dramatic performances of traditional activities to address gender-based violence. The project worked in close collaboration with the community to develop a stage performance retelling a traditional story of how the community chief would listen to the account of a rape victim, reproach the aggressor, make reparations to the victim, and then attempt reconciliation.
Vavra concluded by emphasizing that assistance projects should include women who are both providing and receiving assistance in the program design. In addition, she stated that women should not be just thought of as victims, but as vital contributors to the rebuilding of post-conflict societies.
Alice Morton further defined the post-conflict context that the Africa Bureau’s Strategic Framework seeks to address by evoking many of the horrific acts perpetrated against women, men, girls, boys, and the elderly by all types of combatants. She emphasized that it is a disservice to the individual victims to gloss “over these acts and their consequences with acronyms or complex labels.” At the same time, individual victims of violence, including women and youth, are remarkably resilient and determined to rebuild and strive for peace and reconciliation amidst continuing hardship. In fact, Morton stated that much could be achieved if development professionals supporting reconciliation and reconstruction in sub-Saharan Africa were 10 percent as strong as the people they were trying to help.
Morton then presented an overview of the Africa Bureau’s new Strategic Framework and highlighted several examples of projects addressing gender and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. She then described the Strategic Framework as part of a “significant effort to make programming from the Africa Bureau more gender sensitive.” This is achieved through the establishment of goals, strategic objectives, and intermediary results within the Framework. From the perspective of gender and conflict, the Strategic Framework has two main aspects. As noted by Zakiya, the Framework classifies countries as either those capable of transitional development or as fragile states. A fragile state can be failing, already failed, or be an outlaw state. The Framework’s vision for fragile states aims to “increase political, economic, and social stability; support non-violent resolution of conflict; and enhance democratic practice and equitable economic recovery.”
The Strategic Framework directly addresses issues of gender and conflict in its vision for fragile states, and aims to increase “political, economic, and social stability, [to] support nonviolent resolution of conflict; [to] enhance democratic practice and equitable economic recovery in sub-Saharan African countries vulnerable to, in, and emerging from crisis.” The goals and strategic objectives of this vision directly target and address both gender and conflict.
The Framework also seeks to enhance protection of individuals from physical violence. It supports this objective by calling for improvements to monitoring of gender-based violence, torture, trafficking in persons, and child abductions. The Framework further addresses gender by supporting development of “human and institutional capacity to provide care and assistance to those whose rights have been abused.” The focus on augmenting local capabilities reflects the need to “come up with a sufficient and broad capacity for sustained action among Africans themselves,” said Morton.
Gender can also be addressed through incorporating and adapting traditional indigenous cultural practices. Morton cited the example of female genital mutilation (FGM) or female genital cutting, which like male circumcision is considered an important rite of passage in many African societies. FGM is one of many important “transformative rites” that help construct identities and social interactions. The practice has become increasingly more dangerous because of the spread of HIV/AIDS and other infections. Through lobbying and funding from foreign donors, a number of communities have kept the ceremonial aspects of the rite but replaced the actual ritual with a symbolic activity to mark the transition from childhood to womanhood. The replacement of FGM with another symbolic activity illustrates how traditional social customs or mechanisms can be adapted to address the issue of gender.
Morton then summarized the goals related to gender and conflict of the four previously mentioned resources produced by MSI and the Africa Bureau. They are:
• Address the roots of conflict including sex, age, class, caste, and ethnic based access to resources.
• Examine female and child ex-combatants who are often undocumented.
• Facilitate reintegration of all individuals by providing training for women, child soldiers, former sex slaves, and those who have been marginalized and brutalized.
• Deal with gender-based violence in terms that will help those who have experienced and perpetrated it and to use local indigenous reconciliation processes.
• Encourage further study issues of political inclusion and exclusion.
Despite all of the challenges to addressing gender and violence in sub-Saharan Africa, Morton concluded by suggesting that the chances for success are increased if we can all respond to these problems in the structured context that the framework provides. Both Morton and Vavra underlined the need for USAID programs to address gender across various sectors rather than treating it as a sub-sector. Moreover, it is of critical importance to involve both women and men in post-conflict development and reconstruction.
Question and Answer Session
[Audience comment] In my experience working on programs that build capacity, I have seen that many implementing partners do have experience in peacebuilding training, addressing conflict, and research analysis, but I think the missing link is that we do not include an intermediate result focusing on strengthening organizational management capacity. The reason I am saying this is that many organizations do not have mass program design capacity, so they cannot take their conflict management skills further. They may have technology, but they lack for example, fundraising experience or some do just not have staff. If we could include an intermediate group that focuses on organizational capacity, then we could be sure that these organizations can continue the work on their own after we leave a country.
Over the years, there has been a big effort to integrate gender into mainstream programming. I can see by the makeup of the room and the panel, that gender is still pretty much a woman’s activity. Have we made any progress in our efforts to make gender an integrated part of other programs?
Morton: I nearly have the status of an elder [laughter]. I have been working in development for nearly thirty-two years, and I have been working on gender for longer than that because I did my PhD on what was then called “the changing position of Ethiopian women.” If you measure in terms of actual activities, I think things have improved. If you look at the utilization of gender assessments, the problem has always been how to make them user friendly, and the answer has usually been effective coaching of people in missions and linking gender issues to the strategic objectives in the strategic plan. Things have improved in part because the whole level of attention to indigenous knowledge and ethno-science has improved. I think there is still a long way to go. There is still a conviction among many male and some female medical practitioners in public health that health is a women’s issue. When they are asked to write something about gender, they talk about maternal child health, and this has been going on for years. Perhaps that is an artifact from the fact that men do not go and access public health services very much.
Again, the Interagency Gender Working Group (IGWG) has made great strides in getting people to look at males in all aspects of programming. I understand that funding for Women in Development (WID) has just been cut [Editor’s note: funding was not cut, but it also has not increased to keep pace with inflation]. I think that obviously must be some sort of signal. I do not know who made the decision, and I do not know if we have advocates for WID in Congress. I think we could perhaps ask David [Adams] who is here and who is the head of USAID’s Center for Development Information and Evaluation (CDIE). The goal I think is to help people understand why gender matters and why it is important to take the time to figure out who is distributing the food. You have to get to the “nitty gritty” of people-oriented programming and involve recipients in the process. The trick with that is you have to be careful to understand that what they say back to you may not fit your plans. I think that is always the trick of it. They may want bridges when you want water wells. They may say that women cannot do heavy work, and you ask what they mean [since] women are doing heavy work. Then they may say that women cannot do work with pickaxes, and so you have to keep going through the levels until you find out what will be culturally acceptable. This is particularly challenging in an emergency when you have the least amount of time. Complex emergencies tend to be those in which counter intuitively you have to be the most creative. Until recently, the effort has been to get the goods out there and to assume that that would work.
Vavra: I have not been working in this field nearly as long as Alice [Morton], but I can tell you that from doing the literature review, there are some good examples in Liberia and Uganda of women’s organizations understanding the importance of engaging men as stakeholders. I can refer you to some examples of using theater or engaging at other levels in the Gender and Conflict in Africa: Best Practices document.
Director David Adams, PPC/DEI: Since Alice [Morton] put me on the spot, let me just first generally answer that yes, there are a number of [WID] champions on the Hill this day. In terms of actual legislation effecting USAID or other international organizations, I cannot mention anyone specifically except for Congressman Jim Kolbe, the Chairperson of the House Appropriations Committee for Foreign Operations. I do know that he has agreed to report language, if not bill language, that would encourage USAID to focus on gender issues. I believe there is at least one if not more provisions in the 2006 bill that will be conferenced at the end of September. Let me ask though if anybody who works with Kathy Blakeslee in the WID Office is here who would like to pick up on that question?
Debra Banks, EGAT/WID: Our budget has been $11 million for the last several years. We are at least hoping that it will continue at that level, which means we are not really getting any increases to keep up with inflation. Within the Economic Growth and Trade (EGAT) Bureau there are other needs that sometimes use some of our money, but I think that is all I can say on this subject.
Sahana Dharmapuri, EGAT/WID: In addition to the things that the WID Office does, the rest of the USAID does work on gender just as Afia [Zakiya]’s work and this panel shows. Many other parts of the agency are putting their resources into programming, research, monitoring and evaluation. In one sense, the WID Office plays the role as advocate within the agency to help the rest of the agency move forward by serving it in technical areas as well as advocacy roles.
I have a couple thoughts about indigenous knowledge, resources for peacebuilding, and the relationship between them and gender as we ordinarily approach it. As important as indigenous knowledge, rituals, and performance can be in helping people access resources for peacebuilding, they do present important paradoxes in dealing with violence. If you look at the kind of indigenous knowledge that contributes to identity––especially as people move into adulthood––much of the transformation and change has to do with a movement toward a more aggressive and even violent masculinity. For women, this tends to be a movement towards a more submissive femininity. Dispute resolution mechanisms often work to reinforce traditional hierarchies of gender, to disadvantage women, and to promote in-group and out-group aggressiveness built around a violent masculinity. This leads me to think that most of our approaches to masculinity for peacebuilding and for conflict mitigation are much less well-developed. For those of us who try to program around that, we find ourselves in the difficult position of arguing for additional resources to address these aggressive masculinities.
Zakiya: I think that clearly when we have discussions about looking at indigenous knowledge, whatever the area may be, we have several things to keep in mind. One is that while all cultures and societies in Africa may have an underlying commonality, which is something we can call an African culture, there are differences. The roles of men and women in African societies have changed, they are fluid, and notions of what we may or may not consider patriarchal types of relationships have to be examined. I attended in July a conference at George Washington University that I think was called [African Healing Wisdom: From Tradition to Current Applications and Research, July 6-9, 2005]. One of the presenters at the conference was David Shinn who I think a lot of you probably know as a former ambassador [to Ethiopia]. He gave a presentation on traditional conflict resolution in Africa that included a tremendous panel presenting on this topic. One of the persons who presented was from Liberia and talked about the Everyday Gandhis Project. One of the things they talked about was when you emerge out of a conflict situation, there is an opportunity for change, even where there may have existed some roles or practices that may have oppressed women. We may be able in the peace process to include men and women in redefining and reshaping working relationships in the society and the culture. A lot of times when you involve the people in the decision making process in determining what the outcomes are going to be, people themselves come to their own conclusions about the changes they want to see in their own society, and then you may have the opportunity to design programs that can meet their needs. It is a double-edged sword. One thing I think we have not looked at enough are some of the examples across the continent, even more in terms of some pre-colonial practices where women were very active in holding leadership roles, positions of power, and resolving conflicts. They were usually at the table as peacemakers. In one community when there was a conflict going on and the women wanted to end the conflict, they would bear their chests. Even in Liberia, some similar cultural practices took place that helped to end some of the conflict in that country.
Lawrence Robertson DCHA/CMM: I think this topic is almost too big as gender and conflict, because there are so many different aspects of the things you discussed today. I am working on a paper on women in conflict. I have taken a small slice of what you presented, and that has been challenging enough. I would like to suggest that what you said earlier about using traditional cultural practices has important effects for the people where we work. For example in Liberia, many good examples exist from various villages of people adapting and modernizing cultural practices to make peace within their communities. However, Liberia is a vast and devastated country. The organizational challenge is how to help Liberians organize common practices and movements across their country.
[Audience comment] I wanted to echo and reinforce one of the important points made earlier, which is dealing with men and concepts of masculinity. I guess one of the things that I would want to position is models of best practice around the concept of working with young boys and their own sense of the development of that. We talked a little bit about the rituals that young girls go through, but there are also opportunities to work with young boys and the practices that they go through. A lot of the work that we have done has shown that [teaching] boys to be responsible in their family and personal relationships … translates into how they interact in the world.
How do we better capture what the agency is doing around gender, including the resources that are available through the Office of Women in Development? Is there a better way to capture within the agency the programming that is taking place through sectors so we all get a better picture of what the agency is doing on gender? I think this could even be an effective advocacy tool for elevating the question of how many resources are going to women.
Dharmapuri: One project we are doing at the WID Office is called Global Snapshots. We are going to every single USAID mission, and they are highlighting their gender-related activities on our web site. That project represents a great deal of time and resource investment. There are about twelve countries up so far and every month we will be rolling out four or five others.
Zakiya: One of the things I found in doing this research is that the World Bank has a very large indigenous knowledge institute where they are compiling ways to use indigenous knowledge to address various development issues. On their web site I found this very interesting program, which had various practices being used by organizations in four or five different African countries and also in Jamaica. This particular project is looking at youth in urban areas, and it talked about how we have these large numbers of displaced youth as the result of conflict situations. Therefore, the question is what do we do with the youth? Key areas that we included in the Africa Bureau Fragile States Framework are youth and youth socialization. This particular project talked about the need to have a process by which these young people … engage in socialization and identity construction that would build upon their traditional cultural identities and give them trade and skills knowledge, so that they could find employment. The key thing about the project was the issue of values that we teach young people. This included of course boys and girls, and we have the opportunity to look at what is being taught to the youth in Africa as we begin to engage in reconstruction in post-conflict societies. Thus, we can help them retain aspects of their traditional culture and prepare them with job skills for the realities of contemporary urban society. At the same time, we are encouraging particular social values that promote peace.
How do we take gender empowerment into the villages? What success stories or critical lessons do you have for us there? Also, as we begin to understand the link between resources such as diamonds and conflict, what is the gender analysis part of that?
Morton: I think USAID through intermediaries such as NGOs is doing a much better job than before. I think that the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA) and many other organizations are not working only with elites. Nevertheless, I still remember a project in Senegal where the woman with whom I was working was an urban elite sociologist. I could never feel that she had any ties to the women in the villages we were going to visit. I think my impression has changed over time. It is important not to be too stereotypical about who means what to whom. At the World Bank we had an activity around images of good and bad development assistance. Most of the participants were not American. The bad image was a male in a suit with a computer case. The good image was a woman in a sari sitting down surrounded by a group of men and women. It is again important to make distinctions that are culturally and socially relevant for the place in which you work. Concerning the second question about resources and conflict––I think Lawrence [Robertson] is right. We do need to gather the experiences of those projects and activities in places like Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Congo to see what the gender aspects and issues are that have already been dealt with. One area is mining, and there has been a lot of social and gender analysis done, for example in Niger.
Vavra: Also, the Africa Bureau is focusing on five strategic concerns, and one of those is extractive industries.
Robertson: We have a series of toolkits from the CMM Office, and one of them is Minerals and Conflict. It has a little about gender, and you may want to take a look at it on our web site.
Could you talk more about the methodology that you used in generating some of the “best practices?” How are you defining these examples cited in the handout as best practices? What were some of the criteria you were looking at? Also, how are you distinguishing between success stories and best practices?
Vavra: We started with a number of documents that Afia [Zakiya] had already compiled and researched. We used that as a starting place and then continued our research from there. We focused on identifying different sectors and current trends in the literature. In terms of differentiating between best practices and success stories, I do not know if we went into such a sharp distinction between the two. We were really looking for examples of programs that worked well and involved women.
Morton: I think there are a couple other aspects of what we do. In terms of the best practices versus success stories, what we try to do was to look for pieces of activities or projects that worked, were promising, and were replicable. We also tried to be representative of all of the countries in Africa that get assistance from USAID. We wanted to look not just at women, but also men, youth, and especially child soldiers. In the list of web sites and bibliographies, we did not attempt to be too exhaustive. We included programs where gender had consciously been raised and treated as an issue. There are zillions of conflict web sites so we tried to use those toolkits and sources where we did not just suspect that gender had been treated seriously, but where it was done demonstratively.
[Audience comment] I would like to say something in praise of the White Paper, which has elevated concern for fragile states up to the same level of concerns such as transformational development and export-led economic growth. As soon as you set up the business of fragile states with all the conflicts and vulnerabilities in relation to very provincial issues in countries, it seems to me that you open up a much wider tableau to start mainstreaming gender. You could hardly imagine a discussion like this if the Africa Bureau had not been told that they needed to come up with a framework and that framework has to think seriously about fragile states as well as your “golden child states.” You end up with a list of objectives and intermediate results, and each one is almost a hook out there to say, “Think about the gender aspects of this program.” You cannot avoid it when you start thinking of these fragile states issues. During much of our work it used to be far too easy to say, “Yadda, yadda, yadda, and the women too.”
I would like to raise the issue of religion and spirituality in the role of helping people cope in post-conflict societies, and in creating and reinforcing gender roles. There were not many religious organizations mentioned in the materials, and I was wondering if that was because of a conscious choice in your selection process or whether that reflected the fact that not many religious organizations were actually addressing this issue?
Vavra: It was definitely not a conscious choice. We really did do a pretty exhaustive search for organizations working on gender in conflict and post-conflict situations.
Morton: I think that if we had had more time, we would have looked more specifically at religion, faith, and other belief system aspects, but we looked at them under healing and helping to de-traumatize individuals. I know we mentioned Catholic Relief Services and several other religious organizations. We talk a little bit about Islam, but not specifically about Christian-Muslim conflict. One of the things that is very important in Southern Africa is what are called Zionist churches. They are a particular type of evangelical church. Faith-based community and church-based work have been tremendously important throughout Southern Africa in terms of HIV/AIDS, orphans, and displaced persons. I do not think it is an oversight––we just found the best examples that we could for the particular intermediate and end results that we were trying to examine.
