Building Blocks of Gender Equality
Institutional pathways towards achieving gender equality outcomes.
How can institutions advance commitments to gender equality?
As members of the Chroma Collective, we’re dedicated to advancing gender equality in international development. We recognize the complexity of this task and the need for collective efforts.
Drawing from our extensive experience in implementing tangible, impact driven solutions within our own work and alongside colleagues, we present the following framework. It serves as a guide, offering practical pathways for your institution to navigate and strengthen its commitment to gender equality.
Advancing Gender Mainstreaming in Institutions
As a Collective, we took some time to review our current approaches to gender mainstreaming, including:
Key components Chroma institutions consider in a Gender Mandate
Structural Elements Chroma institutions have in place to mainstream gender, as they work toward gender equality
Enforcement Mechanisms that Chroma institutions employ to ensure that their structural elements function as intended
Indicators that Chroma institutions use to track their own gender equality efforts, as well as recommend (and in some cases require of) their implementing partners to measure Gender Equality Outcomes and Impact (i.e., to confirm that their gender mainstreaming efforts translate into gender equality)
After analyzing our data, we came up with a few recommendations for how we can all do better. You can find these suggestions under each block. We're excited to share what we learned!
We hope this information helps you achieve better gender mainstreaming within your organization and in programming, and that we can together achieve gender equality.
How Does This Work?
Gender Mandate
Each of our institutions has a public-facing mandate to reach gender equality. We use this mandate to drive gender-specific actions that lead to strong development outcomes and to hold ourselves accountable to reaching gender equality goals.
Leadership
Leadership lies across all structural elements as an essential decision making and power holding entity that drives mandates forward.
Structural Elements
In order to realize our gender mandates, our institutions have established systems and processes to mainstream gender at every level.
Enforcement Mechanisms
Having systems for gender mainstreaming isn’t enough. Institutions must establish enforcement mechanisms to bolster accountability.
Outcomes & Impact
If we do all of this well, we will see improved gender mainstreaming within our organizations and in our programming. This, in turn, will lead to improved sector outcomes and increased gender equality overall. The only way to know if we’re reaching our goals, however, is to measure our institutional efforts and associated programmatic outcomes!
