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Indonesia, Women’s Support Project, Phase II: January 1996–January 2002

Purpose

To contribute to an enhanced role and greater participation for women in Indonesia. The project aimed to:

• strengthen the capacity of Indonesia’s national machinery for women to collaborate with its strategic partners for gender mainstreaming at the national and sub-national levels
• develop the capacity of these organizations to undertake and/or contribute to gender-responsive policy, planning and monitoring to ensure that programs did not exclude or discriminate against women

Challenge

The Beijing Platform for Action (1995) identified a number of requirements for gender mainstreaming that were, at the time, largely theoretical. WSP II had to demonstrate practical methodologies for the Government of Indonesia to move from a WID (Women in Development) approach to one that would move women into the mainstream of political, social and economic life in Indonesia.

Approach

Based on participatory needs assessments of staff in relevant institutions, WSP II developed capacity development strategies to meet the needs of the individuals, organizations and systems with which it worked. The intent of these was to move the Indonesian government’s agenda from a focus on small programs for women (representing less than 1% of the national budget) to a focus on gender mainstreaming that would ensure equality measures were included in all government plans and programs.

Project Description

WSP II was a complex six-year project that worked with more than 20 partners in government, six academic institutions and 150 civil society institutions. It remains the largest gender equality project that CIDA has ever funded.

WSP II worked nationally with the State Ministry for Women’s Empowerment (MWE) and the National Development Planning Board (BAPPENAS), along with various ministries including Justice, Education, Agriculture and Manpower. Sub-nationally, it developed pilot projects with the government of South Sulawesi. It supported three Women’s Studies Centres in Ujung Pandang (now Makassar) to carry out action research to inform provincial and national policies on gender. An interdisciplinary team of five Canadian and six Indonesians formed the core long-term team, which was supplemented by more than 60 short-term consultants drawn from academic institutions and government departments in Canada and Indonesia.

More than 1000 participants from the government and non-governmental sectors benefited from project-sponsored training and professional development that ranged from workshops and seminars to longer-term work-place attachments and international scholarships.

Results

WSP II was the catalyst for the following long-term results:

• The enactment of a Presidential Instruction on gender mainstreaming
• The development of guidelines to assist government departments to implement the Presidential Instruction
• A reorganized and transformed MWE able play a much more strategic role within government
• The inclusion of gender as a cross-cutting theme in the next five-year national plan, which was developed by BAPPENAS in consultation with civil society organizations
• The first national consultation to take place in Indonesia that resulted in the National Action Plan on Eliminating Violence Against Women subscribed to by women’s groups, feminists and government
• The creation of 100 women’s desks in police stations across Java
• Gender analysis tools and training materials such as Basic Concepts for Gender Mainstreaming in both CD-ROM and Internet-based formats
• Increased knowledge and skills within government and civil society to sustain gains and move the mainstreaming agenda forward
• The production of a booklet: Accelerating Change: Resources for Gender Mainstreaming that CIDA has reproduced in Indonesian and Vietnamese

Project Director

Gayle Turner
gturner@agriteam.ca

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