Gender mainstreaming: making it happen

Gender mainstreaming was designed to bring gender equality issues into the core of development activities. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programs in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated.

This paper examines what it will take to effectively implement gender mainstreaming and argues that from the perspective of a development agency, the most critical element of mainstreaming – mainstreaming in operations – has not yet been seriously attempted.