The APC has been refining its Gender Evaluation Metholodolgy (GEM) since it was first elaborated in 2001. GEM can help you determine whether your project or initiative is really improving the lives of women and promoting positive change in the community you are working in.

A list of the significant moments for women’s rights in 2011. AWID presents a visual overview of the year through a women’s rights lens.

Harvesting peachSmallholders in the desert region of Huaral depend on irrigation cooperatives to water their crops. For ten years one coop association has been developing an information system based on telecentres to help them to make informed agricultural decisions. But the system is being under-utilised and they decided to find what was going wrong. Using APC’s Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM) they found that older people and women over 40 were being left behind. While decision-making spaces are still mainly all-male, at least some issues identified by women are now on the table.

In rural Uganda, telecentres that have been established to promote rural access to information and foster development are not getting the results they had hoped for. Using the APC WNSP’s Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM) to understand why this is so, UgaBYTES, a Uganda-based NGO that works to promote access to ICTs in rural East Africa, has found that beyond the common obstacles to access like technical infrastructure, connection costs and computer literacy, women face numerous additional barriers if they want to use ICTs to improve their lives.

“With GEM I began to appreciate why sometimes the women that are part of our community resist the empowerment process. I used to be annoyed but now I understand that this is the product of years of conditioning and it will take some effort to reverse the trend. GEM helps you see the situation for what it is, so you can optimise your resources where you can make the maximum impact in creating change,” John Dada has been a GEM user since 2007 in rural Nigeria. GEM is an evaluation tool for determining whether ICTs are really improving or worsening women’s lives and for promoting positive change. GEM has been developed from the ground up, and has involved the collaboration of hundreds of community-based organisations and individuals since its first design in 2002.