Resilience in the Sahel Enhanced (RISE) II Gender Analysis

Initiated in 2012, RISE seeks to increase the resilience of chronically vulnerable people, households, communities, and systems in targeted agro-pastoral and marginal agriculture livelihood zones in Niger and Burkina Faso. The initiative aims to strategically layer, sequence, and coordinate USAID and other humanitarian and resilience-building investments to address the complex and multifaceted challenges faced by communities in the region. The Sahel region, including Burkina Faso and Niger, has experienced a series of high yearly variabilities of rainfalls, droughts, frequent floods, and increasing temperatures, making it difficult for populations to escape the poverty trap. The vulnerability of communities in Burkina Faso and Niger is multidimensional, encompassing poor health and nutrition status, extreme poverty, illiteracy, extended annual lean seasons, indebtedness, gender inequality, degraded natural resources, and low agricultural productivity, as well as governance failures. Recurring stresses and shocks include shared shocks, household-specific shocks, and ongoing stressors that continuously undermine development gains despite ongoing development assistance. A critical desk review of RISE's gender achievements and challenges was conducted to summarize current knowledge and identify programmatic recommendations for RISE implementation. The review highlights the importance of addressing systemic gender inequality in building resilience in households and communities. It notes that deep-rooted historical and perpetuating inequalities between men and women, due to institutional norms and structures, make it challenging to build resilience without addressing these inequalities. The review emphasizes the need for context-specific gender assessments for each RISE intervention zone, which should include variables such as participant gender, age, social identity, and challenges and opportunities associated with these variables. It also recommends that a gender assessment must precede every action in the project cycle to allow programs to articulate and integrate gender appropriately, from budgeting during design to implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. Key findings from the review include the recognition that women from both countries and all ethnic groups face common challenges, but with important differences between groups and between Niger and Burkina Faso. These differences have implications for development programming and may impact development results in different ways. The review also highlights the primary units of target in the RISE approach, which are households, as a fundamental obstacle to the effective targeting of women and measuring results in a gender-sensitive way. The review provides several key recommendations for RISE implementation, including conducting context-specific gender assessments, clarifying that female empowerment is the main approach to gender equality, promoting the participation of men in female empowerment activities, identifying gaps in gender equality using sex-disaggregated data, and capturing agricultural women's, men's, pastoralist women's, and migrants' understanding of vulnerability vis-a-vis land and water resources. Additionally, the review emphasizes the need to be sensitive to gender-based violence that can result from female empowerment activities and to leverage the implementation of land and pastoral laws to allow women, youths, and marginalized populations access to land and other productive resources.