D1.3 Gender Progress Plan
Creators: name: Bergman Lodin, Johanna
name: Pettersson, Katarina
Publisher: name: SteamBioAfrica
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Gender studies
subject: Social inequalities

description: To achieve better, more timely and more lasting impacts of SteamBioAfrica, the project must be socially sustainable and avoid doing any harm or contribute to inequitable social relations. For SteamBioAfrica to become successful and socially sustainable, there is a need to understand the local context and pay attention to social relations including gender. Therefore, enhancing gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) is a project ambition.This Gender Progress Plan (GPP) has been developed to enable all project partners deliver positive project impact. It provides us with a framework for how to approach capacity building on Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI), and how to monitor, evaluate, and learn (MEL) to ensure equitable project implementation. It also introduces a Theory of Change for GESI, outlines the GESI support architecture, discusses GESI communication, and presents the GESI methods and tools. We will work with the following six pathways for achieving social and equitable change:i) ii) iii) iv) v) vi) i) enhancing women’s and youth’s empowerment;ii) questioning norms including gendered divisions of labor;iii) expanding particularly women’s and youth‘s employment opportunities and ensuring decent working conditions for all (harvesting of bush, SHS plant operation, biofuel entrepreneurs selling the solid biofuel on the domestic consumer market, etc.);iv) reducing respiratory illness and other diseases amongst women and children who cook over open fires or use inefficient traditional wood burning stoves by reducing exposure to hazardous fumes;v) reducing time poverty and drudgery associated with firewood collection;vi) reducing the threat of sexual harassment and violence to women and children by replacing the need to collect firewood.This plan provides us with a framework for GESI to monitor, evaluate, and learn (MEL) to ensure equitable project implementation. This plan will be a living document that will be updated, amended, and revised according to need throughout the project life. SteamBioAfrica was stimulated by two important drivers affecting Southern Africa:1) The need for clean, secure, and affordable energy.2) The need to reverse the overgrowth and advance of native bush and other invasive plants.Our ambition is for large scale transformation of unwanted ligno-cellulosic biomass into a clean burning solid biofuel. It is also primarily women and children who are exposed to wood smoke from cooking over open fires or using inefficient traditional firewood burning stoves. This results in them suffering from acute and chronic health complaints, including respiratory and other diseases.SteamBioAfrica seeks to reduce this hazardous exposure to smoke by a clean burning fuel. This will result in a positive impact on the health of particularly women and children in Africa.GESI is an overarching ambition that cuts across all SteamBioAfrica project activities. Informing and instructing project partners in GESI will lead to wider GESI in the target groups who will benefit from the project impacts. This GPP reviews the status of and our approach to four core elements that will be developed during the project for effective realization of the GESI ambitions: capacity building, monitoring, evaluation, and learning.Capacity building: We will develop and strengthen the project partners’ skills and abilities to implement SteamBioAfrica in a way that enhances the GESI ambitions.Monitoring: We will monitor project activities and results. We will then analyse this information to guide project implementation to be sensitive to GESI issues.Evaluation: We will carry out periodic assessment and analysis of the project to identify to what extent interventions have been sensitive to GESI issues.Learning: Throughout the project we will reflect upon and intentionally use the information generated from monitoring and evaluation to continuously improve the project’s ability to achieve results that are supporting GESI.In addition, it introduces the Theory of Change for GESI, outlines the GESI support architecture, discusses GESI communication and presents the GESI methods and tools.