Sustainability in Gender and Development

Caitie Gibbons

Health 4 - Kigali City

Recently I had a site change. A site change is when a volunteer is moved from the site they were initially placed in and put in another due to a variety of reasons. In the past two weeks I’ve said goodbye to my community, stopped all current projects, packed up my house, relocated, and started again. I left clubs and classes in the middle of planned curriculums. Experiencing this made me rethink and question sustainability. What it is and how we can provide it once we (volunteers) have left our communities.

In Saara K’s last post (the post directly after this one) she wrote about setting a precedent for women to imitate: “If we want women to be strong, we as fellow community members must set the precedent for how to conduct ourselves in a way that is an encouragement for other women as well.” While this is key in gender and developement, we must also provide sustainability in conjunction with setting the precedent. Therefore women and girls can continue to grow and flourish long after we've left.

 Joining Peace Corps I’ve learned that sustainability is a difficult thing. We have so little control over everything here. But change is still possible, and sustainability within change is possible as well. In my ten months of service, this is what I’ve learned about sustainability in gender and developement thus far:  

Cling to the positive. I’ve often found, while teaching, that in a class of thirty plus girls I will only have one or two girls who are actually listening and/or understanding. This can be discouraging, but as volunteers we must cling to the positive. Use these students, or people in the community who listen and understand, to initiate change. Find those one or two people who are interested, and hold onto them. Whether it’s a student, a Mama, a community member, or neighbor. They are the stimulus of change, the key to continuing gender and developement, and finding solutions to gender based problems in the community.

Conduct TOTs (Training of Trainers). Provide these individuals with skills to continue growth. TOTs can be as simple as talking over tea in your house, or as fancy as attending a seminar or conference. Find any means to empower, support, and provide resources from them. Many people in the villages do not have access to the Internet, books, and other resources. Find these resources, and share them. Knowledge is power. And while educating, maintain the precedent for yourself and for women in your community. Encourage, and educate them to be examples of strong women in their villages, and to continue to educate others as well.  

Promote and encourage peer education. People tend to learn better when their teacher is someone they can relate too. Students, likewise, learn more from each other (peer to peer education) than from the student-teacher dynamic. When the information comes from a community member or student leader the ideas become more attainable and tangible, rather than an outsider saying “this is possible!” Of course it is, from outside the community, it is within the community that the problems lie. What they don’t realize it is that it is also possible from within. Using peer to peer education shows that they have strong girls and women in their community, and therefore this helps the precedent for women to grow.

Educate your students, and communities, about gender and development. Set the precedent for yourself and for women in Rwanda. Empower them with resources and knowledge. Encourage them to set the precedent, and continue to be the example of a strong woman. Then sit back, let your students, community members and Mamas run the show, let them be the leaders to educate and empower each other.    

New member, new post by Saara K.

Saara Kamal
Karongi District, Western Province

Hello all! Before you read what I have to say about Gender and Development I thought I would quickly introduce myself. My name is Saara Kamal. I am a teacher at TTC Rubengera in Karongi District in the Western Province. I teach fantastic upper secondary students. Unlike other Education Volunteers, I don’t teach English. I teach something called CPPE (Creative Performance and Physical Education). I have about 9 months left in my service and here are some ponderings for you to peruse…

What is it Simone de Beauvoir says, ‘One is not born, but becomes a woman.” That’s great for existential philosophers. But, I feel as if her perspective like so many others is skewed to the paradigm of what it means to be a “Western woman.” After being in Rwanda for about a year and a half, the term woman has a very different meaning, as a woman living here in Rwanda. Here, the inequality between the expected rights of women as Simone would believe, are so far from the reality. In Rwanda, it the responsibility of women to bear and raise children similar to the rest of the world. However, the difference that I see every day in Rwanda in terms of what it means to be a woman is the level of sacrifice that is expected.

Women in Rwanda aren’t expected to go to school and let alone succeed like their male colleagues. Women aren’t expected to become self-sufficient entrepreneurs of their own businesses without judgment from their fellow community members.  Women aren’t expected to refuse the sexual advances of a man without the assumption of some kind of consequence; be it societal or physical. These lowered expectations of women have now created such deep traces of a lowered sense of self-worth that the sacrifices of education and independence aren’t seen as a great loss, but as the norm. Very generally, being a woman in Rwanda includes maybe finishing a level of education (primary, secondary or university) and very soon afterward getting married. The scope of vision for women does not extend very far past their cultural expectations.

The reason why I became interested in GAD (Gender and Development) is based on this definition of what it means to be a woman in Rwanda. My goal for the foreseeable future is use the platform of GAD to expand and give more depth to the meaning of “woman” in Rwanda. I feel that the presence of GAD through Peace Corps Volunteers in our communities has the capacity to effect change in how women perceive themselves. The best way to way to learn something is to practice imitation. If we want women of Rwanda to be strong, we as fellow community members must set the precedent for how to conduct ourselves in a way that is an encouragement for other women to do as well. In addition to imitation and setting an example there must also be open dialogue about questions like, “What is gender?”, “What is development?” and “What does Gender Development look like in this context? In Rwanda?” Right now, I don’t have perfect answers to these questions. But hopefully soon, myself and other supporters of GAD will be on the right course to have tangible solutions the problem of how to promote gender development.

I am very excited by the things that have already been done in relation to Gender in Development in Rwanda (GLOW and BE camps in particular!) in the past three years and am even more excited about can happen in the future. Let’s be the change!