Writing Gender into Proposals

Gender in development refers to the socially constructive role of women and men, girls and boys in developmental projects. Gender is highly essential not only from a donor perspective, but also from the developmental planning and implementation points of view. Gender enables effective delivery of services with high level of participation based upon equitable distribution of resources. All advanced planning has to have gender as a priority. Therefore, gender has to be integrated into proposals at the initial stage itself. Below are some useful ways for writing gender into proposals:

- We can reflectively integrate gender into all our documents in two ways. The first is documenting actively and accurately how our activity or training is affecting the entire community, including women.
- We should try to add a gender component throughout the proposal, not merely a section. This maybe a bit difficult to conceive, yet it gives a better chance of success for the project at the donor’s desk. We can understand this using an example. Suppose we are listing out strategies and activities in a proposal. During this time, we ask these questions to ourselves: How does this activity/training increase women’s and men’s participation and decision-making processes? How does this activity/training improve women’s and men’s income levels and economic conditions? How have I actively encouraged the participation of both women and men in the activity/training? What are the women’s and men’s priorities separately? These questions help us gather the gender-based information.
- We also have to use a language which is sensitive to gender. Language is often patriarchal and therefore carries and reflects gender biases and inequalities. Gender-fair language minimizes unnecessary concern about gender in your subject matter, allowing us to focus on what people do rather than on which sex they happen to be. For example, the practice of using he and man as generic terms poses a common problem. Rather than presenting a general picture of reality, he and man used generically can mislead the audience
- All data presented as evidence in the Problem Statement/Project Rationale section of the proposal has to be disaggregated gender-wise. Gender disaggregated data gives a clear overview of the situation and the need for the project.