PUTTING PRIORITY INTO PRACTICE: Sida’s Implementation of its Plan for Gender Integration

Gender mainstreaming is an increasingly common strategy for integrating gender concerns throughout organizations and projects. This report presents the findings of a continuous evaluation of the implementation of the Swedish Development Agency’s (Sida’s) Plan for gender integration. The Plan stipulates that the amount of funding to contributions with gender as the primary focus should be increased and that routines for more effective gender integration should be developed. The Plan came into force in 2016 and the assessment was carried out in three stages between late 2016 and June 2018, building on analyses of key Sida documents and on focus groups and individual interviews at Sida headquarters as well as in partner countries Myanmar and Zambia.

The report concludes that Sida has implemented most of the Plan’s objectives and that gender equality is indeed commonly seen as Sida priority, by both its own members of staff and by partners. The report also notes, however, that Sida’s work with integrating gender is uneven and dependent on the commitment and competence of individual staff members. A challenge that Sida has in common with many other organizations is thus how to turn a priority into organizational learning and practice, so that gender issues–in line with a gender mainstreaming strategy–are understood and adequately attended to by all members of staff.

ELIN BJARNEGÅRD is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies and Associate Professor in Political Science at Uppsala University. She is Coordinator of Development Studies in the Bachelor Programme on Peace and Development. Her research interests are within the field of comparative politics with a particular focus on gender, masculinities, conflict, political parties, and informal institutions. She is leading a research project on gender aspects of election violence and another one on gender politics in electoral authoritarian states, both funded by the Swedish Research Council. Her research has been published in journals such as Comparative Politics, Government & Opposition and Journal of Peace Research. She is the author of the book Gender, Informal Institutions and Political Recruitment: Explaining Male Dominance in Parliamentary Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Together with Fredrik Uggla, she carried out continuous evaluation of gender mainstreaming in development cooperation between 2016 and 2018, focusing on Sida. The findings were published in the report Putting Priority into Practice: Sida’s Implementation of its Plan for Gender Integration.