Cambodian Civil Society Strengthening Project Gender and Social Inclusion Assessment Final Report

The assessment aimed to understand how the partners' internal institutional structure and external program interventions affect GESI in their outcomes. The framework developed from this assessment is designed to help EWMI and its partners learn to improve, capture change for accountability, and project future impact. The assessment analyzed the extent to which CCSS grantees are delivering on GESI at the outcome level, using the three overarching goals of the USAID Gender Policy as a framework. The report includes a background summary situation analysis on gender, ethnicity, and disability issues in Cambodia. Cambodia has achieved the CMDG targets for gender equality in education and literacy, but this progress has yet to be reflected in women's equal participation in higher levels of public sector management, decision-making, and leadership. The GESI assessment covered both internal institutional structures and external program-level outcomes. Key findings of the GESI assessment of the 12 CSO partners are as follows: Partners' main GESI metric is quantifying participation in staffing and project activities in community structures and events. While representation matters and is a necessary starting point, there is a need to broaden the focus to also include the substance and issues being discussed and addressed, which will lead to GESI-responsive results. The existence of a gender policy, and its implementation, is an element of the GESI infrastructure necessary for building a robust internal GESI system. Eleven of the 12 partners have a gender policy that covers gender and sometimes other forms of inclusion such as IP, in either staffing or programs as beneficiaries. Five partners have quantitative targets for women in organizational leadership and/or in participation in programs. A third of the partners is led by a woman Executive Director, which is fairly significant in a male-dominated field such as governance and natural resource management. This trend is mirrored in the average representation of women in the partners' Board of Directors and Senior Management Teams. In terms of staffing, the average is 40% women, and partners that work with interns and volunteers report a higher representation of women in these roles. One partner, HA, is led and staffed 100% by IP, 4 (33%) of the partners have IP on staff, and only 2 have IP on their Board of Directors and Management Teams. Only 3 partners claimed to have GESI expertise, a third have gender focal points, approximately half have had some sort of gender training for selected staff through other Donor or NGO-funded initiatives, and most requested further GESI training from CCSS. Key gender issues raised include female staff and beneficiary attrition due to marriage, gender-based violence in communities and personal security issues for female staff in the field, the high level of women's participation in project activities and the low level of women's voice and participation in leadership and decision-making. There is an emphasis on women's role in natural resource management (NRM), and the impact of NR issues on women's time, income, and labor. Key issues related to indigenous people include IP being most affected by land grabbing and displacement and relying on natural resources for their survival. It is more challenging to have IP demands met (related to land concessions, etc) due to the entrenched business interests at stake. It is difficult to recruit IP on staff due to language and capacity constraints. Indigenous women experience more burdens because in IP culture men cannot help with housework. The majority of the partners state that they use a mainstreaming approach to gender, although this is implicit rather than explicitly documented in the reporting. Due to the regional and issue-specific nature of working with IPs, partners working on IP issues face unique challenges in implementing GESI.