Blog · Explainer
Gender mainstreaming, explained simply
It is one of the most used phrases in development and one of the least understood. Here is what gender mainstreaming means, how Nigeria's policy approaches it, and why it matters for girls.
If you have read a government policy or an NGO report, you have probably seen the phrase "gender mainstreaming." It sounds technical. The idea behind it is simple.
What it means
Gender mainstreaming means checking how every policy, budget, programme and decision affects women and men, girls and boys differently, and designing it so that it works fairly for all of them.
Instead of treating women's issues as a side project, you build gender into the main work. The United Nations adopted the approach after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and it is now used by governments and organisations around the world.
An everyday example
Imagine a state government builds a new secondary school.
- Without a gender lens, it builds classrooms and a single block of toilets.
- With a gender lens, it asks: do girls have private, safe toilets with water, so they can manage their periods? Is the road to school safe for girls walking in the early morning? Are there female teachers? Are there rules and procedures to deal with sexual harassment?
Same budget line. Very different results for girls.
How Nigeria approaches it
Nigeria adopted a National Gender Policy in 2006. It was reviewed and a revised policy was adopted in 2021. The policy commits government to building gender into laws, budgets and programmes across sectors such as education, health, the economy and governance.
One of its best-known targets is affirmative action of at least 35 per cent for women in appointed public positions. In April 2022, the Federal High Court in Abuja ruled that the government should enforce the National Gender Policy by allocating 35 per cent of public appointments to women. Implementation remains uneven.
The federal government has also urged states and local governments to adopt the revised policy, because much of the work that affects girls' daily lives, from schools to clinics, is run at those levels.
What it is not
- It is not only about women. It looks at how decisions affect everyone, including boys and men.
- It is not a one-off training. It is a habit: asking the gender question every time.
- It is not treating everyone the same. Sometimes fairness means doing different things for different groups, such as providing sanitary facilities for girls.
Why it matters for girls
Many of the barriers girls face are not caused by one bad law. They come from many small decisions made without thinking about girls: a school timetable, a clinic's opening hours, a scholarship rule, a bus route. Gender mainstreaming is the discipline of thinking about girls every time a decision is made.
How GCCAI applies it
We try to practise what we ask of others:
- We ask girls what they need before we design programmes.
- We look at how each programme might affect girls differently depending on age, location, disability and family situation.
- We measure results separately for different groups, so we can see who is being left out.
Questions you can ask
Whether you work in government, a company, a school or a church, you can ask three simple questions of any plan:
- Who will benefit, and who might be left out?
- Have women and girls been asked what they need?
- How will we know if it works for them?
