Gender Transformative Approaches: A review of current trends and key issues

Gender transformative approaches (GTAs) engage with, and address deeply embedded structural inequities. While pastoral systems share certain features with other livelihood systems, their unique characteristics require that GTAs are tailored or adapted to address particular perennial challenges. Tailoring GTAs is also essential to ensure that interventions do not unintentionally reproduce inequalities through exclusion. 

We reviewed primary and secondary sources to understand GTAs in pastoral contexts in SPARC countries in Africa. The data sources provide insights on the primary foci of GTAs, target groups, impacts, mechanisms used to implement GTAs and, lastly, metrics used to assess impact. We used the “Reach, Benefit, Empower, Transform” (RBET) framework to evaluate project level data and identify projects that had explicit transformative aims and impacts. A total of 18 interventions were included, five of which targeted adolescents. 

Findings are:

• GTAs are implemented unevenly geographically and often embedded in other sector-specific or cross-sectoral programmes. Most of the interventions aim to improve livelihoods, enhance resilience, reduce harmful practices, improve health and resource and land governance. Common impacts occur in decision-making, reduction in harmful practices, and resource management. Collective action in groups and community dialogues are the most common mechanisms used to implement GTAs. Robust methodologies to assess impacts were an exception and more common in large interventions spanning regions within or across countries.
• GTAs exist in multiple and diverse forms and can amplify existing grassroots and community-led efforts. We recommend developing and deepening partnerships with local Civil Society Organisations, national Non-Governmental Organisations and linking in with wider platforms and networks to garner locally embedded and led sustainable social change.
• The review highlights a need for more practically oriented materials and guidelines on best practices to support equitable pastoral development. The development of robust metrics would also improve understanding of what works where and for whom and generate wider systematic and comparable sets of data on GTAs in pastoral contexts.

Don't miss our policy brief 'Gender transformative approaches in pastoral areas: good practices and recommendations' here.