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The purpose of this review is to assess to what extent UNHCR, WFP, Unicef, and UNOCHA are aware of and integrate the standards of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Gender Handbook in Humanitarian Action in its programming, and to what extent this Handbook is being used and implemented as a guiding tool in humanitarian operations.
The review also briefly assesses the GenCap system and the cluster approach with regard to the implementation processes.
The main body of the data was collected between July and October 2010. I visited Kenya and Haiti to study the operations related to the Somalian refugee camps in Dadaab and post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, respectively.
In addition to personal interviews in the field, I have conducted telephone interviews with selected members of staff and management representatives at headquarters. I have studied relevant documents, including programme and project proposals, training material, progress reports, newsletters and email correspondence. GenCap advisers have been invited to fill out a questionnaire about their work in different humanitarian operations, with different agencies. In addition, I have observed field officers in their daily work, to obtain some understanding of the contextual challenges that affect the way humanitarian assistance is delivered.
The data are solely qualitative, and much of it in narrative style, which means they are challenging to process into ‘quick reference’ sets of results. My aim has been to capture what is actually taking place, with regard to the practical implementation of gender mainstreaming and targeted actions in humanitarian operations, rather than how the UN organisations or their staff wish to be perceived.
Findings indicate that while none of the reviewed organisations have fully integrated the Handbook in their humanitarian work and responses, all are in the process of implementing standards and principles of similar or comparable quality. Staff relate almost exclusively to their own organisation’s gender policies, handbooks and guidelines for capacity building, programme planning and field-level practices, with the Handbook e-learning course and the IASC Guidelines for Gender-based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian Settings as notable exceptions. What seem to be missing are functioning systems to ensure coherence and predictability in Gender mainstreaming and targeted actions (GMTA) at all organisational levels, and/or ownership to the Handbook as a common reference.
The clusters represent a systematic approach to ensure a more coherent delivery of gender sensitive emergency support by UN agencies. The Handbook and its standards can as such be seen to represent a common effort to put GMTA on UN’s humanitarian agenda, in which all participating agencies – through the IASC and the cluster-based coordination structure – are active stakeholders. Findings suggest, however, that most of the identified gender mainstreaming and targeted actions originate within the agencies rather than through cluster cooperation and contact.
The GenCap initiative comes across as an effective support in bringing IASC’s gender material more actively into the agencies’ humanitarian training, planning, and practices.
GenCap advisers also appear able to function as ‘agents’ who understand and know how to bridge IASC material and the agencies’ on-going activities in a given emergency operation. The number of GenCap advisers deployed is, however, fairly limited in relation to the scale of humanitarian operations worldwide.
Recommendations include a strengthened focus on ‘calibrating’ the individual agencies’ own policies and guidelines on GMTA – with the Handbook as a common reference, intensified encouragement of inter-agency and agency-partner communication on genderrelated issues, further roll-out of the Handbook e-learning course, a possible expansion of the GenCap capacity, and a new common training capacity on gender that provides career-meriting certification on gender-related competence.
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