Integrating Gender in Care and Support of Vulnerable Children

This 64-page guide was developed for organisations that implement care and support programmes for children made vulnerable by HIV and AIDS. According to the publishers, there is a lack of resources and tools for gender integration specifically for programmes designed for vulnerable children, and this guide was produced to fill this gap by serving as a practical tool in design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of care and support programmes. According to the report, care and support programmes must proactively identify and challenge harmful gender norms. Because of their child-focused, family-centred, and community-based approaches, care and support programmes for vulnerable children are well positioned to challenge harmful gender norms at multiple levels.

The report adds that young people may be especially open to thinking in new ways about gender norms and roles; therefore interventions with children and adolescents may be particularly effective. Understanding different approaches is the first step to integrating gender in a programme. The Gender Integration Continuum provides a framework, categorising programme approaches by how they treat gender norms and inequality in the planning, design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of a programme. The most desirable for gender integration are programmes that apply transformative approaches, to actively strive to examine, question, and change harmful gender norms and correct power imbalances in order to reach development and gender equity/equality objectives.

The guide explains that to understand gender norms in the local context and how they affect the well-being of vulnerable children, implementers should conduct a gender analysis during the overall assessment phase that normally takes place at the beginning of a programme. Gender analysis refers to a systematic process of assessing gender inequities and their impact on children, youth, and adults in a given programmatic context; and considering the implications or impact of a programme on gender roles and norms. Gender integration must be informed by the best available information about the likely effects of gender inequality on young people of different ages, on their caregivers, and on the programme’s intended outcomes. Because boys, girls, men and women often have access to different types of knowledge, they also might have different beliefs, perceive situations differently, and conform to gender norms. Society at large (including community, business, and religious leaders) might also have beliefs about how girls, boys, women, and men should behave, how they are differently valued and what they are capable of.

The next step is the design of the activities that will help the programme. Linkages with local groups or advocates working toward gender equality are critical in this phase, as they may be able to help determine the activities that are most likely to be effective. Activities might include community mapping to identify existing services, and an assessment of services to determine which are of highest quality and trusted in the community. Other activities could include stakeholder meetings to raise awareness among existing service providers in the community and to develop protocols for referring clients between services. The guide notes that initiatives to address gender-based violence are typically most successful when they address both treatment and prevention. The project could also implement community-level awareness raising and dialogue to inform or remind people that these services are available, and promote critical reflection on the norms underlying GBV.
The guide provides a list of interventions and activities that have the potential to increase gender equity and the well-being of children and adolescents. Following are a selection related to communication:

Cross Cutting

• implement behaviour change campaigns that discourage sexual risk-taking and violent and controlling behaviours in boys and men, or that demonstrate the benefits of equitable partnerships between girls or women and boys or men;
• engage communities in discussions of gender inequality and its consequences for women, men, boys and girls;
• educate girls and boys on gender through school-based or community-based initiatives;
• support initiatives that encourage boys and men to discuss harmful gender norms and identify strategies and actions to challenge these norms; and
• foster the meaningful participation and leadership of girls and women in program and community activities.

Health and Education

• foster discussion among male and female youth about sexual consent and coercion;
• promote shared decision making around safer sex and pregnancy prevention;
• increase the access adolescent girls have to information on their bodies, their health, and existing health services;
• promote health-seeking behaviours and reduce gender-related barriers for accessing health services;
• increase community awareness about the importance of education for girls. Promote reflection about gender norms that keep girls out of school; and
• support initiatives that address the issues that keep girls out of school, such as caring for young siblings or unsafe school or commuting environments.

Psychosocial Support and Protection

li>implement education programmes to help boys and girls develop life skills such as communication, negotiation, and decision making;
• facilitate access to counselling and emotional support services for survivors of gender-based violence;
• facilitate access to emotional support services for female caregivers or heads of household who are often overwhelmed with negative emotions, such as stress, anxiety, and depression;
• provide education to caregivers and in the broader community on children's rights and prevention of gender-based violence;
• promote open community dialogue on local traditions or cultural practices that are harmful to girls (such as early or forced marriage and female genital mutilation);
• develop strong coordination, collaboration, and referral mechanisms with local child protection authorities and service providers to ensure a prompt response to cases of gender-based violence; and
• support advocacy for girls' and women's property and inheritance rights, promote enforcement of laws that uphold these rights.

The guide also mentions that measuring changes in gender norms and behaviours, requires at a minimum output, outcome, and impact indicators disaggregated (separated) by sex and age to measure the effectiveness of the programme’s activities. Whenever feasible, programme monitoring should go beyond the disaggregation of data according to sex to determine if the programme is helping increase gender equality. The best way to formulate these gender-impact indicators is by looking back at the gender-based constraints and opportunities identified in gender analysis and the activities designed to address them. Identifying and developing gender indicators in accordance with the programme objectives will help determine if a gender-based constraint was lessened or even removed over time.