How to use this Toolkit
The objective of the toolkit is to provide practitioners with a roadmap for how to design and implement policy projects to improve women’s access to agricultural resources. The Toolkit is made up of five chapters that describe the approach and each of its components. We recommend that you read the Toolkit in its entirety to understand how these different pieces work together to lead to the changes achieved in GAPP. While each of the chapters can be read separately, the uniqueness of the GAPP Approach comes from the sum of its parts.
Who should use this Toolkit
The GAPP project is an agriculture, gender, and advocacy project. It aims to improve food security and nutrition. It works to reduce key gender gaps related to women’s lack of access to productive resources. And it employs advocacy techniques to drive institutional and policy changes towards a reduction in gender gaps. Few projects combine these three (3) practice areas. The Toolkit was therefore written in the hope that it might provide agricultural, gender, and policy advocacy practitioners with ideas for how to break through our all-too siloed work environment.
What will you find in this Toolkit
Context matters immensely. The Approach described here was designed in response to the specific context in western Honduras where GAPP was implemented. It was rooted in the local legal and political frameworks and took advantage of the existing institutional structures and emerging political opportunities to advance its agenda. The Toolkit provides an overview of the project components that can be adapted and implemented in other contexts. Iy contains reflections about what did and did not work well to guide others in making decisions about different design and interventions elements. These reflections originate from the partners involved in GAPP and in some cases are drawn from the external evaluation of GAPP. We hope you will find them useful.
The Toolkit describes the GAPP Approach and provide you with information that can serve as a resource for embarking on a similar process elsewhere. We have included a range of documents and resources materials produced by GAPP partners either as part of this project or previous projects. These include workshop and training materials, reports and needs assessments, templates, and other project outputs. These materials are provided in their original language, Spanish.
- Workshop and training materials: Some were developed by GAPP partners prior to the project and GAPP benefitted immensely from its partners’ expertise in the areas of women’s leadership and men’s engagement. These materials have been refined over the years and validated for use in the Central American context. We recognize that there is a large body of workshop and training materials available for both women’s leadership and men’s engagement. While we offer these materials to you as resources, we encourage you to consult materials that have been developed for the specific country or region where you will be working.
- Reports and needs assessments: We have included a selection of reports and needs assessments from the project. The needs assessments serve as resource material to understand the different institutions that worked with the GAPP project. The reports that have been included recount the implementation of different activities in the project and serve to fill a gap where the implementation process for the activity was new and evolving.
Templates and other project outputs: Finally we have included templates and other project outputs. The templates illustrate the language to be used in development gender-responsive policies or Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) and are accompanied by a sample of the actual document developed by the Municipal Women’s Networks and the rural credit institutions.
Acknowledgements
The Toolkit was prepared by Olenka García, GAPP Project Director, Lutheran World Relief (LWR) and Cristina Manfre, Senior Associate, Cultural Practice, LLC.
The team benefitted greatly from and would like to thank the staff at Asociación de Organismos No Gubernamentales (ASONOG), Lutheran World Federation (LWF), Centro de Bartolomé de las Casas (CBC), and Comisión de Acción Social Menonita (CASM) for providing valuable input and insight into the design and implementation of the GAPP project. The contents of the Toolkit were developed as a result of multiple interactions with the team and through written input provided over several months. We hope that their reflections are accurately portrayed here within the lessons learned sections of the document. Additionally, the external perspective of the GAPP project provided by the evaluation conducted by Learning for Impact was useful for identifying and validating the importance of various components of the GAPP Approach.
Finally, the Toolkit would not have been possible without the input, comments, and support from Trinidad Ariztia, former Grants Manager, LWR; Carolyn Barker-Villena, Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, LWR; and Krista Jacobs, Gender Advisor, United States Agency for International Development (USAID).