Gender mainstreaming and promotion of gender equality: A case study of the Swedish Cooperative Centre, Vi-agroforestry project, Kisumu-Kenya

Gender mainstreaming is accepted by many national and international agencies and Non-governmental organization, as an effective strategy for promoting gender equality. Many researchers widely agree that essential but can also lead to poverty eradication, human development and general economic growth everywhere but more specifically in Africa. This just shows the importance at a global level of gender equality and any strategy towards achieving it.
 

The main aim of this thesis is to assess how gender mainstreaming as a strategy and approach has led to gender equality within the Swedish Cooperative Centre-Viagroforestry project-Kisumu (SCC-VI). It is based on exploring how gender mainstreaming works on a day-to-day basis in the project area. To collect relevant information, a detailed background review of Swedish Cooperative Centre-Viagroforestry project was done; field staff were interviewed with the help of a predesigned semi -structured question guides and focused group discussions were conducted with different farmer groups involved in the project.

The interviews and the focused group discussions were later transcribed as part of analysis. The focus group discussions, which were conducted in Luo, were translated to English. The main finding was that as a project, SCC-Vi is committed to mainstreaming gender in its activities, however the staff had limited skills for mainstreaming. Similarly, it was clear that focus was mostly put on numbers/quantitative aspects as opposed to the qualitative aspects of equality. The conclusion drawn here is that mainstreaming may lead to gender equality, but its success highly depends on how the process is implemented and whether there is adequate knowledge about the structural causes of inequality and skills the staff have to do it. From this research however, it was not possible to show that gender mainstreaming has led to equality.
 
Okumu, J. (2012). Gender mainstreaming and promotion of gender equality: A case study of the Swedish Cooperative Centre, Vi-agroforestry project, Kisumu-Kenya. Master’s Thesis. Department of Earth Sciences. Uppsala University.
 
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