From Africa Recovery, Vol.13#1 (June 1999), page

Making development gender sensitive

NGO empowers African women and gives policymakers a balanced gender perspective

By Jacqueline Irving

While many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) promoting gender equality have a crucial role to play in the development process, they often have little or no ability to directly influence policymaking. Seeking to address this problem, ABANTU for Development, an NGO with offices in Kaduna (Nigeria), Accra (Ghana), Nairobi (Kenya) and London (United Kingdom), uses a twin-track approach to provide training, information and advice on mobilizing resources towards sustainable development in Africa. Through its unique training programmes and activities, ABANTU is devoted, on the one hand, to heightening policymakers' awareness of gender issues and, on the other, to empowering African women to influence policymakers.

ABANTU's Training for Policymakers programmes aim to make policymakers more aware of how their policies will affect women. Ms. Wanjiru Kihoro, ABANTU's director, told Africa Recovery how a recent training programme in gender-sensitive budget preparation evolved from a working group session on making budgets gender sensitive, led by ABANTU at the Economic Commission for Africa's 40th anniversary conference, African Women and Economic Development: Investing in our Future, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last year. The government ministers, civil servants and others participating in the working group thought so highly of the experience that they suggested ABANTU provide training in gender-sensitive budget preparation to policymakers on a regular basis.

As for the second half of its twin-track approach, ABANTU trains African women and their NGOs in policy analysis, economics, healthcare and other areas of expertise to equip these women with the knowledge and skills to help shape development policy. ABANTU also helps African women acquire advocacy and negotiation skills to make their voices heard by international agencies and organizations as well as at the national level.

ABANTU takes great pride in its people-centred philosophy ("Abantu" means people in some African languages). With an emphasis on "working with and for women but not to the detriment or exclusion of men," ABANTU's programmes and activities harness resources for the "benefit of the whole community."

In the 1997-98 fiscal year, 386 women and men representing 250 organizations participated in ABANTU's training workshops on various topics including strategic planning, policy analysis and policymaking, lobbying and advocacy, management and fundraising, and conflict management within organizations. Workshop participants came from 17 African countries.

Benefits derived from ABANTU's training programmes often extend beyond the scope of the initial participants. For example, a training session for the Uganda Gender Resource Centre spawned additional training sessions for 80 people in the rural districts of Western Uganda. After forming a rural network, the trainers in Western Uganda went on to work with decentralized government structures to pass on the benefits of the ABANTU-originated training to community-based organizations.

Strong North-South links

Working with NGOs based throughout sub-Saharan Africa and with African and refugee community organizations in the United Kingdom, ABANTU has access to an extensive network of trainers from a variety of backgrounds in the public, private and voluntary sectors.

Describing itself as "a Southern NGO with a Northern presence, combining North/South experience," ABANTU considers strong North-South links among its main assets. ABANTU encourages a two-way flow of knowledge and experience between its own organization and organizations in Europe and North America, and it plans programmes to explore new networks and ideas for cooperation with European NGOs.

Among the aims of ABANTU's 1998-2001 Strategic Plan are improving African women's access to, and use of, information and telecommunications technology and fostering the development of gender-sensitive communications policies. "I'm very excited about our work in this area. We recently provided training to twenty participants from different African countries (mostly communications officers) where we introduced the Internet, providing training in technical skills such as Web page design," Ms. Kihoro told Africa Recovery. ABANTU also has launched a "Strengthening Electronic Communication Capacities of Women's Organizations in Africa" initiative, which helps African women acquire the skills to use and develop information technology systems both within and between their organizations.

But ABANTU places high priority on "moving beyond just providing training in technical skills and looking at how we can influence ICT policies -- specifically the gender implications of these policies," Ms. Kihoro added. Noting that few African countries have formulated concrete policies on ICT, Ms. Kihoro pointed out the importance of trying to shape ICT policies at the earliest stages.

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