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ENERGIA News Issue 2, April 1997

Resources

Gender Analysis and Forestry: International Training Package

Vicki L. Wilde and Arja Vainio-Mattila
Reviewed by Margaret Skutsch

This is a very beautifully produced set of materials to support training in use of gender analysis for community forestry. Unlike many gender training programmes for development, this does not start with attempting to change attitudes to gender. It focuses instead on the kinds of forestry problems that the course participants have experienced and encourages participants to recognise that some of these problems have been due to failure to take into account gender differences. It then presents a straightforward framework for carrying out gender analysis. This is similar to a number of other well-known models and consists of four steps:

1. the contextual profile (what are the constraints and the supports and what are the trends in the area concerned);
2. the activity profile (what activities are men and women responsible for);
3. the resources profile (who has access and who has control over the resources) and
4. the programme action profile (how can the situation best be tackled).

Two separate training courses are included, one for management level staff (section B), and one for fieldworkers (section C), and although the basic steps are similar, completely different materials are provided for these. In each case, appropriate formats are presented for each of the steps in the gender analysis. There are also very extensive notes to the trainer on how to present the materials and facilitate participants’ discussion.

A set of detailed and very interesting case studies from the Asian region (section D) is provided, which are intended to be used with both target groups. In reality these require concentrated (English) reading ability, and a lot of time; they will be too complicated for use with many groups but they do offer the trainer her/himself a wealth of examples to quote from..

In addition to the main booklets, there is a plethora of other pamphlets included in the folder to provide supporting information, for example, on how to use rapid rural appraisal techniques to develop case studies. At first sight in fact one might be rather confused as to what is what in the package, but it is worth spending the time to go through it carefully and sort the different sections out. There is a lot of useful information here.

The package is available from the following Forests, Trees and People centres:

• Africa: Forest Action Network, P.O. Box 21428, Nairobi, Kenya; Fax +254.2.718398, Email fan@arcc.or.ke
• Asia-Pacific: RECOFTC, Kasetsart University, P.O. Box 1111, Bangkok 10903, Thailand; Fax +66.2.5614880, Email corveer@mozart.inet.co.th
• North America and Caribbean: NACARCE, 5400 Grosvenor Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA; Fax +1.301.8973690, Email istfiusf@igc.apc.org
• Europe: FTP, IRDC, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 7005, 75007 Uppsala, Sweden; Fax +46.8.671209, Email bitte.linder@irdc.slu.se