The North-South Centre of ETH Zurich held its Annual Conference in Zürich, Switzerland, on the 12th June 2012. The conference on “Gender perspectives in research for development” was the first of its kind at the ETH. Its objective was to highlight fields of research in science and engineering where, in recent years, the gender issue has been rediscovered to provide sound scientific results. It shed light on important topics and research areas in the broader realm of R4D (research for development).

In her welcome address, Renate Schubert, the Gender Delegate of the President of ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), emphasised the value adding component of bringing a gender perspective into research questions. However, she conceded that ETH Zurich was not yet fully aware of this additional resource to create new knowledge, especially in science and engineering.

Focusing on food and health, Martin Bloem from the World Food Programme stressed the importance of micronutrients in preventing malnutrition and its effects, such as stunting. Malnutrition during early childhood has a strong negative impact on the physical and mental well-being of the affected persons throughout their lives. Prevention during the critical period of the first 1,000 days was affordable, added Bloem. Only 100 US dollars per child was needed to provide all important nutrients to infants in their first two years.

Pablo Eyzaguirre, from the Rome-based international agricultural research centre Bioversity, explained that women were often the stewards of agricultural biodiversity as they were in charge of subsistence production and vegetable growing. Despite this important role, women usually did not have the same access to resources and inputs for their plots of land as men did. He concluded that by providing women in developing countries with these resources and inputs to prepare their land, 100 to 150 million people could be lifted out of poverty.

Catherine Bertini, a professor at Syracuse University in New York and World Food Prize Laureate 2003, emphasised that women and girls played a frequently overlooked key role in ending hunger. Since they were responsible for food production, processing and preparation their abilities and traditional knowledge had to be considered in every intervention in the agricultural sector. Bertini therefore elaborated a gender checklist for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that incorporated the gender dimension in every project from its formulation to its evaluation.

In her paper, Chinwe Ifejika Speranza, from the University of Bern and the German Development Institute, presented several obstacles to the empowerment of female farmers in the African context. Due to a lack of awareness and education, particularly rural women in Africa were sticking to traditional gender norms and customary law. In addition, female farmers were severely disadvantaged when it came to land heritage rights, Speranza emphasised. In contrast to Asia, where collective action of rural women was widely applied and had led to an improvement of their status in rural areas, female farmers in Africa rarely organised themselves in self-help groups. Gender policies and strategies in national constitutions or action plans were seldom implemented at the local level, and African administrations had difficulties in employing well-educated gender experts. To overcome these hurdles, Speranza proposed working closely both with traditional leaders and human rights activists.

Access to safe drinking water and sanitation had become a human right in 2010, but safe sanitation was far from being a reality for one third of the world’s population, warned Sylvia Chant, professor at the London School of Economics, at the conference in Zurich. Since women were responsible for fetching, treating and storing water, more research and interventions were needed on the gender aspect, Chant postulated.

With regard to sanitation, women were disproportionally affected, as this issue concerned their dignity and security. Going to the toilet might be a dangerous endeavour for women, especially at night. Rosemary Rop, from the Water and Sanitation Program Africa of the World Bank, stressed that sanitation was more than just building toilets. She added that education in hygiene was closely linked to sanitation, being a key aspect in eradicating lethal diarrhoea, the number-one cause of child mortality in the developing world. Inadequate toilets and hygiene standards in schools were empirically linked to high drop-out rates of girls, Rop maintained.

The panel discussion dealt with the question why gender mainstreaming was being implemented in international organisations but much less in research. The panel members concluded that nearly 20 years after the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, in 1995 the high-flying expectations had been replaced by slow progress in practice, leading to a certain “gender fatigue”. The panel agreed that gender research did not attract big money, nor did it earn the researchers a high reputation. However, in an increasingly complex world with immense future challenges, the incorporation of gender perspectives in research for development was imperative in finding excellent solutions, the panel concluded.

View the presentations online 

Author: Patricia Heuberger-Meyer, North-South Centre, ETH Zurich