Assessing The Impact Of Development Projects On Women

Working paper on project evaluation regarding the impact of development projects on women - covers participation in decision making and access to project benefits; notes effects on social status, economic role, health and nutrition; discusses methodology for making data analysis comparisons; includes classification of project characteristics, etc. References.

Gender impact assessment is a way to estimate the expected impact of an intervention, such as a development project, on women; and to what extent the specific interests and needs of various categories of women will be affected. Such assessment provides the information relevant to project planning, and should preferably take place before a project begins. This book presents three case studies, from Burkina Faso, India and Bolivia, in which this method was used, together with an introduction to the methodology, conclusions regarding its use, and the lessons to be learned from the studies.

This book shows how social impact assessment (SIA), which emerged barely five decades ago, as a way to anticipate and manage potentially negative social impacts of building dams, power stations, urban infrastructure, highways, industries, mining and other development projects, is now widely in use as a planning tool, especially in developed countries. Although SIA has still not gained much acceptance among development planners in Asia, the situation is gradually changing. In India, SIA initially mandated as a policy guideline in 2007 is now a legal requirement. SIA in China has also recently become obligatory for certain types of development projects. Bangladesh, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are other Asian countries that provide examples from a variety of externally funded projects illustrating the use of social impact analysis in project planning to improve development outcomes. With contributions from an array of leading experts, this book is a valuable resource on SIA, indispensable for policymakers, planners, and practitioners in government, international development agencies, private-sector industry, private banks, consultants, teachers, researchers and students of social sciences and development studies, also NGOs everywhere, not in Asia alone.

First published in 1992, Assessing the Demographic Impact of Development Projects based on studies in developing countries focuses on conceptual, methodological and policy issues related to development projects. It considers whether demographic effects can be assessed and why development planners should be interested in such an assessment. A.S. Oberai examines the extent to which economic and social changes generated by specific development interventions have influenced demographic behaviour in a particular context. He suggests how desired effects can be enhanced and undesired effects minimized by policy makers and planners in developing countries in order to deal with problems of population growth and its distribution. The major shortcomings of existing methodologies are identified, and the author indicates the future direction which research might take in order to be more scientifically valid and useful to policy makers. This book is a must read for scholars and researchers of development studies, political economy and labour economy.

Very little is currently known about the demographic impact of most development projects and the ways in which this impact can be assessed. This book, based on studies in Third World countries, focuses on conceptual, methodological and policy issues in its evaluation of the demographic impact of development projects. The author examines whether demographic effects can be assessed and why development planners should be interested in the results. A.S. Oberai examines to what extent economic and social ranges generated by specific development interventions have influenced demographic behavior in a particular context. He suggests how desired effects can be enhanced and undesirable effects minimized by policy-makers and planners in developing countries in order to deal with problems of population growth and its distribution. The major shortcomings of existing methodologies are identified and future directions which research might take are outlined. The study is based on a synthesis of country studiesreviewing the demographic impact of development projects carried out in Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. It also includes analyses of the demographic impact of development interventions in several other countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, and Nigeria. Published for the International Labour Organisation

Agricultural development projects increasingly include women’s empowerment and gender equality among their objectives, but efforts to evaluate their impact have been stymied by the lack of comparable measures. Moreover, the context-specificity of empowerment implies that a quantitative measure alone will be inadequate to capture the nuances of the empowerment process. The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), a portfolio of 13 agricultural development projects in nine countries in South Asia and Africa, developed the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and qualitative protocols for impact evaluations. Pro-WEAI covers three major types of agencies: instrumental, intrinsic, and collective. This paper synthesizes the results of 11 mixed-methods evaluations to assess these projects’ empowerment impacts. The projects implemented the pro-WEAI and its associated qualitative protocols in their impact evaluations. Our synthesis finds mixed, and mostly null impacts on aggregate indicators of women’s empowerment, with positive impacts more likely in the South Asian, rather than African, cases. There were more significant impacts on instrumental agency indicators and collective agency indicators, reflecting the group-based approaches used. We found few significant impacts on intrinsic agency indicators, except for those projects that intentionally addressed gender norms. Quantitative analysis does not show an association between the types of strategies that projects implemented and their impacts, except for capacity building strategies. This finding reveals the limitations of quantitative analysis, given the small number of projects involved. The qualitative studies provide more nuance and insight: some base level of empowerment and forms of agency may be necessary for women to participate in project activities, to benefit or further increase their empowerment. Our results highlight the need for projects to focus specifically on empowerment, rather than assume that projects aiming to reach and benefit women automatically empower them. Our study also shows the value of both a common metric to compare empowerment impacts across projects and contexts and qualitative work to understand and contextualize these impacts.

Despite the billions of dollars spent on development assistance each year, there is still very little known about the actual impact of projects on the poor. There is broad evidence on the benefits of economic growth, investments in human capital, and the provision of safety nets for the poor. But for a specific program or project in a given country, is the intervention producing the intended benefits and what was the overall impact on the population? Could the program or project be better designed to achieve the intended outcomes? Are resources being spent efficiently? These are the types of questions that can only be answered through an impact evaluation, an approach which measures the outcomes of a program intervention in isolation of other possible factors.This handbook seeks to provide project managers and policy analysts with the tools needed for evaluating project impact. It is aimed at readers with a general knowledge of statistics. For some of the more in-depth statistical methods discussed, the reader is referred to the technical literature on the topic. Chapter 1 presents an overview of concepts and methods. Chapter 2 discusses key steps and related issues to consider in implementation. Chapter 3 illustrates various analytical techniques through a case study. Chapter 4 includes a discussion of lessons learned from a rich set of 'good practice' evaluations of poverty projects which have been reviewed for this handbook.

In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household. The authors describe the development of pro-WEAI, including: (1) pro-WEAI’s distinctiveness from other versions of the WEAI; (2) the process of piloting pro-WEAI in 13 agricultural development projects during the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, phase 2 (GAAP2); (3) analysis of quantitative data from the GAAP2 projects, including intrahousehold patterns of empowerment; and (4) a summary of the findings from the qualitative work exploring concepts of women’s empowerment in the project sites. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned from pro-WEAI and possibilities for further development of empowerment metrics.