Gender Relations
in Lizhi Township(click to download .pdf)
The Canadian partners, Algonquin and Northern Colleges, worked with CMTCC staff to identify the leadership and training skills that could increase the competence of rural women as they managed their small businesses. This training would also serve to develop administrative and management skills that could be transferred to the formal economy as development comes to Sichuan. A number of project activities were designed to achieve this goal, including completing a needs assessment, delivering training programs, and conducting research.
The research component of the WREN project was only one small part. The project also funded a number of training programs:
The research component of the WREN project focused on the analysis of gender relations and the identification and application of gender-sensitive indicators to training interventions for women within an impoverished rural community located in five villages in the Lizhi Township of the Liangshan Yi Minority Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan Province, PRC.
A secondary research objective was to apply specific methodologies of data collection and test their usefulness in projects of this kind. The results reported here were gathered through the use of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Gender Relations Analysis (GRA).
PRA typically involves a multi-disciplinary team who work with a relatively small sample size of local people. Using observation, interviews, discussion and diagrams, they collect semi-structured data and qualitative descriptions that are wide ranging in scope. In this project, the technique was used to consult with rural women and elicit detailed information about their perceptions, priorities and constraints.
The Participatory Rural Appraisal approach used in this project focused on gender differences. Within agriculture, gender-based differences are commonly observed in land control, access to training, use of technology, access to financial services, education levels, mobility, and time available for work and leisure. Such differences result from gender roles, defined in this project as social constructs that delineate responsibilities between men and women in social, cultural and economic activities, access to resources, and decision-making authority. In other words, while biological roles are fixed, gender roles will shift with social, cultural, economic and technological change.
GRA is defined as concepts and tools used to determine whether and how gender considerations have been incorporated into planning and development operations.
The use of GRA supports GAD initiatives in that it provides specific directions for development practices in the target community and provides benchmarks for measuring results by:
Through the use of GRA, the project team sought to identify the underlying barriers to women's participation in agriculture. Even where opportunity appears to be equal for both genders, participation rates for men and women may differ. Through GRA, the project team endeavored to determine why the equity of impact does not always match the equality of opportunity.
The project team had to identify a set of Gender Sensitive Indicators that would guide data collection and analysis and provide the basis of the study's conclusions.
An indicator is a measurement, number, fact, opinion or perception that points to a specific condition or situation, and measures changes in that condition or situation over time. Indicators come from all forms of evidence, both quantitative and qualitative, and measure changes over time.
As a consequence of the participatory appraisal among women in Lizhi Township and gender analysis, a number of results-based indicators were developed to assess the impact of the project during and beyond its operation. Appendix A lists and defines the different types of indicators that the team considered and differentiates between qualitative and qualitative indicators; this appendix also identifies the criteria the project team used for selecting indicators.
In March 1998, the project team put together the following plan to guide the Gender Relations Analysis component of the WREN project, and modified it on an ongoing basis during implementation. Figure 1 shows the relationship between the training and the analysis components of the project.
