The UNDP Namibia Country Office and the Benguela Current Largre Marine Ecosystem 3 Project hosted a Gender Analysis Inception Meeting for the project on 09 January 2019.

The meeting is being led by National and International Gender consultants, who will be developing a gender policy and strategy for the Benguela Current Covention  (BCC). The BCLME 3 project is a multi-national project aimed to improve Ocean Governance and is based in three countries; Angola, Namibia and South Africa.

The BCC has prioritised gender mainstreaming as a strategy to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment. It aspires to make women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation in all its projects (and activities) so that women benefit equally.

Purpose of gender analysis

A gender analysis attempts to systematically identify the different roles, rights, needs and opportunities of women and men, boys and girls and the relations between them in the project’s context.  A systematic gender analysis examines gender and social roles and relations from an interpersonal, household, community, local, national and regional perspective. It attempts to understand how gendered power relations contribute to discrimination, subordination and exclusion through the study of public and private social roles adopted by men, women, girls and boys.

It also considers other social factors that may contribute to discrimination, such as age, ethnicity, class or caste, etc.  Gender analysis is a way of assessing how initiatives are likely to contribute to change, building evidence and documentation to contribute to broader advocacy and social movements and a key way of remaining accountable to beneficiaries and limiting any unintended harm. 

In terms of gender analysis, gender relations and development issues are interlinked and thus have an impact on decision making and problem solving. Gender analysis facilitates for proper formulation of realistic and expected results and targets.