|
Abstract:
|
The gender mainstreaming approach has gained great importance within International
Development Assistance due to the argued centrality of women empowerment and gender
equality to poverty alleviation and sustainable development. The approach has been widely
criticized by Post Colonial feminists for not taking the local reality into consideration, and
seeing Third World Women as a homogenous group with similar problems and interests.
The following thesis takes its point of departure in these critiques and aims at developing a
context specific approach to the integration of the women in the Olanchito Sustainable
Forestry Management project in Honduras by Nepenthes/ANPFOR. During a field study in
two of the nine communities that are participating in the project, we have explored the local
reality and the wishes and needs of the local people. The findings suggest that income
generation is of utmost importance for the women, which constitutes a great motivation to be
integrated in the project. Obstacles to their integration are the high work burden of the
women in the household, their confinement to the domestic sphere of the home and the
presence of Machismo, which restricts them in their freedom to work outside their
households. Furthermore, the findings of the thesis suggest that the women would rather like
to work on the level of networks of households with close kinship ties than in women’s
groups. Because of the exploratory nature of our thesis, we generate some hypotheses based
on our research findings, and the thesis concludes by outlining some concrete
recommendations for integrating the women in the Sustainable Management Forestry project
in a context specific way. |
