The UK’s approach to aid leans heavily on the UN Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals. Gender equality is a frequent rhetorical point of UK-Rwanda collaboration, and the UK has previously praised Rwanda in this area. However, in their actual programming women’s issues are separated into their own category which can cause them to be siloed.
In 2021, the UK’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN, Julian Braithwaite, made a statement on Rwanda to the UN Human Rights Review Panel. His only criticism of the Rwandan government was the ‘repression of other political and media rights’, while praising their ‘promotion of gender equality’ and ignoring the negative (and well-researched) impact on the lived realities of women and girls in Rwanda.
The limited space for meaningful civil society and grassroots engagement restricts the voices of women who are not part of the chosen Rwandan Patriotic Front elite, including women in rural areas, and of diverse linguistic or ethnic backgrounds. Braithwaite’s focused critique on the repression of civil and media rights in Rwanda while at the same time praising Rwanda’s gender equality initiatives reflects how women are being ‘added’ and considered separate from these problems by high-level decision makers.
This relationship formed through symbolic gestures is not exclusive to the UK. A key feature of USAID programming in Afghanistan was a focus on incorporating Afghan women into a free market economy. For example, the 2015-2019 Rebranding Afghanistan: Creating Jobs, Changing Perceptions, Empowering Women programme focused on promoting women-run small businesses. The gender equality elements of this strategy focused heavily on women’s participation in the economy and democratic processes, without much beyond these broad, high-level, and arguably ideologically objectives.
It is clear from UK and US policies that both countries’ understanding of what constitutes gender equality and empowerment is not matched to what would be desired and needed by those living in Rwanda and Afghanistan.
The focus on elements such as primary education, parliamentary representation, and free-market participation creates a broad strokes approach to highly complex issues. The numbers game has opened the opportunity for it to be codified and gamified within the complex ulterior motives of state-to-state diplomacy.
For metrics to be used more effectively, localisation should not only be considered at the implementation level, but through every stage of development programming needs assessments, design, planning, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. Local women should be the ones to decide the most appropriate metrics for gender equality, not distant Western donors, or aid ecosystems.
The current gender equality policies promoted by Western donor countries merely add women to existing institutional and structural frameworks, rather than seeking to make tangible change to these structures. They allow agency for recipient governments, but largely leave out local women. This is exacerbated by inequitable partnerships between aid agencies and local NGOs and communities, and their notable absence in both the new UK International Women and Girls Strategy 2023-2030 and multilateral institution accountability mechanisms and decision-making platforms. Locally-led gender equality movements determining the issue agenda, especially those involving youth, have seen real change, such as in Namibia and Nigeria, but these remain the outliers rather than the norm.
Intersectionality and genuine inclusion are not yet part of the bilateral aid policy agenda, despite the UN’s 2016 Grand Bargain promising contextualised and localised action commitments (which avoids defining what is meant by localisation). Rather than designing gender development programmes which are bespoke and involve diverse local women’s voices from inception, development aid, particularly gender equality, have been subject to an irrelevant and political numbers game.
This blog is based on the author’s dissertation which won the 2022 LSE Africa Outstanding Dissertation Prize.
Photo credit: Paul Kagame used with permission CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
