One of the main challenges of
mainstreaming gender issues into development programs is dealing with
country-specific contexts.
 |
|
Kelly Cronen, director
of gender practice,
Chemonics International |
According
to Kelly Cronen, Chemonics’ director
of gender practice and a former anti-trafficking adviser at the U.S. Agency
for International Development, there’s just “no ‘one-size-fits-all’
solution.”
“What the
gender issues may be for women in Jordan may be completely different from what
women are facing in Afghanistan,” she said in an interview with Devex.
“Responses need to be tailored to each country context.”
Cronen gave
the example of how Jordan — in theory a progressive Muslim nation — has only
three women shelters, while deeply conservative but “donor-driven” Afghanistan
has many more.
Here are a
few excerpts from our conversation with the Chemonics expert on gender and
human trafficking issues.
What
are main challenges for mainstreaming gender in development programs?
One of the
things we’re trying to overcome is these cultural, societal norms that have put
women in restrictive … roles. But when implementing partners are trying to
change that, they themselves have a hard time .. breaking out of traditional
gender norms. It’s a big learning [experience] for all partners involved to
rethink exactly what it means to mainstream gender. Once you go into more more
specific issue and country contexts … the big challenge is that there’s no
‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. What the gender issues may be for women in Jordan
may be completely different from what women are facing in Afghanistan.
Responses need to be tailored to each country context.
Can
you share examples of when you had to do some tailor-fitting yourself?
One of the
things I was really shocked to see in Jordan was that there are only three
shelters for women in the whole country … and the culture is very restrictive
[toward] shelters for women facing violence, trafficking or other forms of
gender-based violence. But in Afghanistan, there were more than 15 shelters …
it’s much easier to operate a shelter and there is government support. You
would think of Jordan as a progressive Middle Eastern country, but it turns out
it is more difficult to support women’s shelters there than in Afghanistan. I
was completely prepared to assume the opposite … and sometimes I wonder if
Afghanistan is so donor-driven that it’s all the international donors that have
been influential in setting up the shelters there, and therefore shaping the
community response to these issues and what resources the community has to
address them.
What
would you highlight from projects and strategies you developed during your work
against trafficking of women and girls?
I think
there’s a tendency in the anti-trafficking community to say that awareness
raising is the main component of prevention, and we often miss the boat on
things like what are the push-and-pull factors that make people enter
trafficking. The push factors are obviously any vulnerabilities that make them
susceptible, like economic hardship, trouble at home, unstable family life —
there need to be more programs that address that.
The pull
factor is also overlooked … One of the things that’s always been in my soap box
is that there aren’t adequate refugee protection mechanisms available to
victims of trafficking. A lot of times, the system automatically assumes that
destination countries are doing a proper job of identifying victims of
trafficking, providing them any type of assistance they need in the country
before sending them home, but what I found in Albania was that it’s not the
case there. [Often] when victims are picked up, it’s much easier to assume that
they’re illegal migrants, that they’ve broken migration laws, so they’re
forcibly deported back home. Jordan has a huge number of potential trafficking
victims, but they’re sent to prison instead of a shelter, and if they go to a
police station they’re not given a translator.
The
destination countries are not set up to identify the victims of trafficking. I
saw a lot of victims [of forced repatriation] … that if they wanted to press
charges against their trafficker, there were no adequate mechanisms to protect
them [even] if they are no longer safe in their home country. For me that’s a
huge gap.
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