Commentary:
“Today, one of the most significant factors hindering gender equality and women’s empowerment is the lack of economic independence of women, especially those living in developing countries. Silvia Sperandini works for IFAD to help entire villages break down the social and cultural barriers that make it impossible for women to reach their full potential.”
We talked tò Silvia Sperandini about her tasks as the gender, targeting and social inclusion specialist during IFAD’s missions aimed at reducing rural poverty. She provided us with interesting evidence of her work in the field, which involves making sure that IFAD’s economic investments in rural areas reach all women and men equally and effectively.
- What is IFAD and What is IFAD’s approach to gender equality, women’s empowerment and social inclusion?
IFAD is quite a particular organisation. It is a UN organisation that was established in 1977 as one of the outcomes of the 1974 World Food Conference. The starting idea was building an organisation focused on rural poverty reduction and development. But, IFAD is actually a hybrid organisation, because It is also a development bank and that works in two ways.
Firstly, through “loans” that are highly concessional, low-interest loans given to member states and countries to finance agriculture, rural development, and poverty eradication programmes. They are a way to channel development resources to areas and populations that need the support the most, with the ultimate goal of empowering poor rural women and men in developing countries that need to achieve higher incomes and improve food security.
Secondly, we work through “grants” that are donations that we give to institutions and organisations that are helping us to pilot something new. They are used to pilot innovation, new approaches or activities that we want to introduce in our bigger portfolio, with the idea to improve and to “scale up”. This is a word that is very interesting in development, we use it a lot. The idea is to start smaller with some innovation and good practices and then bring them to scale in one of our programmes.
All we do is aimed at bringing people at the centre of development intervention.
But what does it mean? I always bring an example of when I was on mission, I was in Egypt and they were showing to me the good results of an agricultural project, a project where we managed to increase a lot the productivity of the area, the first thing they told me was “we have secured new contracts for the export of pomegranates”. It was a very successful initiative, but what really matters is knowing what’s the impact on people. At the end what we do as development experts is to bring people at the centre of the development stage, bring changes to their life and improve their living conditions. So whatever we do on agricultural development, it’s because we want to see the life of these people changing.
In our projects we have a very high percentage of the young population engaged, especially through a particular methodology which is called a “household methodology” which helps all the household members decide together their development pathway. We use it to hear more about their needs, what their expectations are, and in what aspects of life they would like to invest. Our target groups are young people, rural women and men, older people, indigenous people, marginalized groups that normally don’t have a voice, and people with disabilities. In particular my division takes care of making sure that people are benefiting from development interventions. If you talk to colleagues working on markets, livestock, or agriculture, sometimes they tend to think about the dynamics only from a productive perspective. But change it’s not automatic, there are barriers that are much deeper that impact poor people and prevent them from benefiting from economic improvement. So this is the role of people like me, making sure that what is done in development will reach the right people. I cover in particular gender equality and women’s empowerment.
- Can you clarify how gender equality and social inclusion are linked to economic development and sustainability?
Agricultural growth cannot be enhanced if women and men are not both able to participate fully as economic actors in development. When men and women both have the same opportunities they can get access to benefits, like economic growth and better quality of life, in the same way. Women are economic actors that should have an equal weight into the development pathway. Yes, gender equality it’s a human right, but it’s important both from the human right perspective and the development perspective. If 50% of a population is somehow not benefited in the right way by development aids, economic growth is limited.
In developing countries, women are overwhelmed by lots of tasks. Sometimes they tell me that it’s impossible for them to add something more even if It would benefit their future. I believe this tò be an example of how when there is an unequal distribution of daily workload, development is impacted anyway. The inclusion of women in economic matters would increase their quality of life and as a result also the development of the entire village.
- What are the barriers to gender equality and inclusion and how do they differ in more developed countries?
One of the biggest barriers tò gender equality Is definitely the fact that women have limited control on assets, such as: land, technologies, finance and documents. They don’t have a bank account, so even if they would like to start a new business, and for business I mean buying three chickens and one goat in order to start some minor production, they wouldn’t have basic access to the inputs to do so. It’s challenging to talk about development when they are lacking the basics that they need in terms of start-up capitals.
In addition, rural women often lack decision-making at all levels. Let me give you an example, in Uganda, there was this fantastic project, improving the quality of coffee beans. People were receiving training and very smart women started growing their own coffee beans. After a while they came to us and they told us that overnight their husbands stole the beans because they wanted to sell them and use the money to buy alcohol. In the end, women weren’t even in control of the production because they had no voice in decision-making within the household and they were in a lower power dynamic compared to the men.
Another important aspect Is nutrition. Women often eat least and last. They grab whatever is left over in the family, and this negatively impacts their nutritional status and productivity. Some years ago, a lady from the nutrition team showed me a radiography of the brains of malnourished children. Basically, when women that have limited access to food and suffer from malnutrition get pregnant, the baby suffers malnutrition for 1,000 days, from the moment of conception up to the early age, and negatively and heavily impacts the baby’s brain. The brain she showed me was black and burned in some parts. She told me, Silvia, you are a development person, how can we talk about development and equal opportunities when this baby Is already compromised without even being born?
This should make you understand that If we don’t consider aspects such as low sustainability and poor nutrition we fail on rural development. Gender equality and women’s empowerment are not just feminist ideals; they are essential for economic growth, poverty eradication, and sustainable development. Without removing these barriers, progress cannot be achieved.
In short the three pillars of our policy, tò fight gender barriers, are economic empowerment, equal voice, and equitable balance of workload.
- Can you provide a concrete example of your work on the ground?
Firstly I wanted tò talk tò you about the so-called “theatre of development” which is a methodology aimed at making all negative behaviours very visible.
Negative behaviours are represented on stage so that the community can really learn how tò spot and stop wrong dynamics. This methodology is led by local communities, and it’s very useful because we notice that it helps enable changes in the relationships, change some gender power dynamics, discriminatory social norms and practices, reduce gender-based violence, teenage pregnancies, which are a big issue in Africa, and also disability exclusion. This form of theatre, that is done with the young people, it’s important to make everyone understand that there are some practices that are wrong. So, it is useful because it inspires some collective action and raises awareness.
It Is not just a social moment in the village on Sundays but also a fundamental project to bring awareness and identify some household challenges.
Another example of what we do in the field are “gender dialogue sessions”. This methodology is just a sort of interactive discussion, a forum where you have men and women together and they have an inclusive conversation to discuss some of the challenges that they have in the village.
Improvement Is channeled by discussing village-level problems, men and women share different views and look for solutions together. In those moments women are empowered to raise some of the issues that are particularly heavy for them. Those are periodical meetings, sort of guided conversations where they can come together, discuss and find some solutions. I think you can tell that what works on the ground is a sort of holistic approach.
In the end, probably from what I’ve been telling you right now, you noticed that I’m putting the emphasis on economic empowerment, decision making, voice, representation and workload distribution. In fact what we need in development is sort of a combination of different ingredients to make the perfect cake. Sometimes we look at empowerment only from the economic angle: Improving production, giving opportunities, giving training, access to finance to start a business. But, If we don’t remove, as I said, all the social barriers and root causes of inequalities, people won’t be able to gain benefits from what Is invested on the economic part and their life will not change. So again, the type of narrative that we try to sell at IFAD, and it’s not easy, is that we don’t need tò invest only in economic development and empowerment from a productivity angle, but also remove all those social barriers that are preventing vulnerable groups from having the same opportunities as others. And that’s why I keep saying that removing inequalities is key, and will require both aspects, the social and the economic one.
Those activities that can change discriminatory norms, discriminatory values and behaviours are not aimed at changing people’s mentality. For example we have done some of these methodologies with polygamous families. We are not telling them that they can’t have seven wives. But we are trying to explain that all the wifes should have the same rights as the husbands in managing family and work dynamics, and we help them dialogue inside the family, in order to move forward together into the development pathway. Another kind of element that works at the project level is analysing and addressing all the inequalities, in terms of role, responsibility, decision-making, sharing benefits, especially at the household level, because everything starts in the household somehow. If you don’t adjust the dynamics starting from there, it might be difficult then to cascade at a larger scale.
I usually show a pyramid. In the pyramid, at the bottom there are poor people, and at the top, the better off. Our objective is really to work with the bottom of the pyramid, because in order tò work on poverty eradication and rural development, which is our mandate as IFAD, we really need to move those people that are down in the pyramid up to the level of the better off. Of course, we also work with the better off, because they generate economic opportunities and work for the lower classes or lower segments of the population, but our interest is really to move people from the bottom to the top.
- How are these issues linked to violence against women and what can we do to prevent it?
Most communities are very conservative, during missions we understood that when people of the village hear something from other people of the village they are much more likely tò listen tò them, this prevents frictions and enables a much faster and positive change in their behavior. In order tò reach a particularly conservative community, what we did was build a group of ten people from the village, made not only by women, but also by representatives of the police and chief leaders. In the village there was a big issue of violence against women and early marriages. So, this group went to the households that had some of those challenges, and helped them understand that, for example, marrying a 13 year old with a very old man in the opposite part of the country was something negative. This group was extremely important especially because It was made of village people that went and managed to explain what practices were negative and why. Let’s be clear, we don’t want to change social norms, we challenge negative social norms, which is different. You cannot tell me that marrying a 12 year old girl Is a good practice, and we try tò channel a positive change by showing the damages that early marriages and violence against women are generating.
- What is the current state of development aid?
It’s not an easy time, we are experiencing a sort of reduction towards development, especially due to different crises such as conflicts. We are hearing that some projects got stuck, because there is a tendency, not only in the US, tò recalibrate expenditures. In some cases the tendency is to move aids towards more secure dynamics. So, yes, development is impacted, we are still trying to understand how, but definitely some organisations are more impacted than others. Normally, when there is a period of conflicts all the countries tend to look at their internal dynamics. Of course, some thematic areas might be more impacted than others and that depends on the main donor that is behind their projects. The narrative is changing, maybe climate change was on top of all the tensions in the past, and they got a lot of resources, because it was considered a priority area, but for some donors, from one day tò another, it’s not a priority any longer. So, of course, this is impacting, and it’s implying some reorganisation.
- How did you find your calling and develop your career?
I got exposed tò development aid at a very young age. I went tò a Catholic sisters elementary school and there I saw many videos from their missions in Africa, which was very interesting. When I got older I decided tò study at university International political science which really fascinated me. After a while I heard of the opportunity tò do some volunteering work which was the entry point to missions in Poland, Albania and so on. At that time I understood that that kind of work was what really interested me, because I love tò travel and tò be part of projects that have a common goal. So yes, I started through volunteering work which helped me gain a scholarship for a master in development projects and that’s when I really left the theory behind and started seeing how everything works on the ground.
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