Forum News 11.3: From Rhetoric to Practice

 In the 5 years since Forum News last focused on the issue of gender and transport, we have seen a series of initiatives and some small research effort from the donor community seeking to integrate gender into the transport sector. We have also seen many donors seeking to mainstream gender across the different activities of their development agenda. It is, therefore, reasonable to assess the progress made towards gender ‘mainstreaming’ within the transport sector in particular and to identify some steps for the future. Has the cumulative effect of these initial activities built enough momentum to mainstream gender equality into the transport sector, or have these developments been too fragmented to effect mainstream change?

Recent research funded by the World Bank helps us to examine the nature of this progress.The research carried out by IC Net, TRL and members of the IFRTD network looks at a series of donor supported projects and programmes from the transport sector that have, or should have, integrated gender within them. It reports the findings of 10 separate case study reports from 9 countries across the developing world. Seeking to broaden the micro-scale, household, and village level focus of earlier projects/research, in order to examine transport programmes and projects in the context of; the national gender and transport policies within which they operate; and the approaches and capacity of the transport institutions responsible for their implementation.

Format: Bulletin
Date: January 2004
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