Gender & Poverty
This workshop was led by Mel Nicholls of Oxfam’s UK Poverty Programme.
Mel stressed that the gender dimension is critical to understanding poverty. Women are the majority in all people experiencing poverty, especially the old and those of non-white ethnicities. In addition, women’s poverty frequently means children’s poverty. Ultimately, men and women have different needs and communities are diverse. If we pay insufficient attention to gender (or diversity) in our regeneration efforts or assume that everyone is the same, then men and women and different groups will benefit unequally. Mel stressed the need to make gender central in all stages of regeneration and set gender targets such as ensuring gender equality on decision-making bodies.
The workshops on gender and poverty went on to construct problem walls and solution trees and came up with the following key recommendations:
Attention is required to the timing and structure of meetings, not least to create an appropriate space for women and men to meet separately and together to discuss issues and solutions. This is especially important for non-white women from our diverse communities who are culturally prevented from actively participating in mixed gender meetings;
We need to use social activities as a vehicle for engaging more men in local decision-making (as women apparently need less reason to meet and compare notes);
We need to consider a buddying/mentoring system to provide positive role models, especially for women and young men;
We must include childcare provision in projects as an appraisal criteria;
We must Implement gendered monitoring of outputs to identify if NDC activities are meeting women and men's different needs.