Volume 4, Number 1
April 1998
The CGIAR's Systematic Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis for Technology Development and Institutional Innovation
[From Jennifer Green, Gender Working Group coordinator at the CGIAR (Jennifer_green@dai.com).]
Background and Purpose
The CGIAR has increasingly seen the participation of farmers, particularly women, as vital to technology development. In 1996, CIAT (the convening center), CIMMYT, ICARDA, and IRRI, in collaboration with the CGIAR Gender Analysis Program, initiated a System-wide Program in Participatory Research and Gender Analysis. This program is dedicated to moving beyond isolated experiments to assessing through empirical studies how gender analysis and other methods for user differentiation and gender-sensitive participatory research contribute to technology development and institutional innovation.
The Program's Operational Structure
The Program has been organized around three working groups: Plant Breeding (PB), Natural Resource Management (NRM), and Gender to ensure that CGIAR projects integrate gender analysis into these respective thematic areas.
The challenge of the PB Group is to better differentiate which stakeholders should participate in plant breeding and to identify who actually benefits when participatory plant breed-ing approaches and gender analysis are used.
Like the Plant Breeding Group, the NRM Group will uncover and examine the importance of gender analysis and other methods for user differentiation and gender-sensitive participatory research, and how these methods have an impact on natural resource management projects.
The Gender working group's task is to assess the role of gender analysis and other user-differentiation methods in NRM and PB. The group will also provide guidelines on the use of gender analysis in future research efforts.
Jennifer also noted that the NRM and Gender groups are soliciting case studies of how gender analysis and gender- and user-sensitive participatory methods and/or strategies have been used in NRM research for technology development and institutional innovation, or both. The System-wide Program on Participatory Research is particularly interested in cases at indi-vidual (farm/plot) and collective (watershed) levels for address-ing NRM concerns in soil, water, forestry, and/or watershed management and use. Anyone who sends information will be included on the Gender and NRM list-server groups and will receive information on development and findings of this work.
