GSLL 1516 - Gender Equity In Development

Women’s participation and empowerment in development is one of the major Millenium Development goals and has become an important ideal in a lot of development policy and theory, yet there has been little dialogue as to how gender equity can actually be implemented in practice.

Women centered projects, such as microcredit and cooperatives, create new assets and enlarge the amount of available resources to communities but often do not address control of existing resources. Genuine gender equity must take into account existing relationships as well as newly developed ones.

This course helps students to understand and recognize the various forms of women’s power, potentials for disempowerment in many development initiatives, and how we as practitioners can facilitate gender equity in community-based sustainable development.

The course will be highly interactive and will emphasize the sharing of experiences, ideas, and insights from participants. Participants will be encouraged to ground the ideas discussed by applying them to their own communities or development projects. This course will use case studies and readings to understand gender equity in development.
All required reading materials for the course are available online.

Upon completion of this course participants will be able to:

• Compare /women in development/ vs. /gender equity/ approaches
• Incorporate gender equitable methodologies into community development activities
• Design a gender equitable project for your community or project area