Measuring the invisibles: Gender mainstreaming and monitoring experience from a dairy development project in Tanzania

Abstract

Development projects are under pressure to deliver positive gender changes. This paper provides a practical example of how one project in Tanzania attempted to meet this demand. It details how a conventional technical project developed its own understanding of what it is to be gender sensitive, and identified gender concerns that it might address. The main monitoring challenges became those of how to assess the significance of routinely recorded events such as increased cow allocations to women, and how to incorporate monitoring activities that might focus on researching less obvious, less visible, and more subtle processes of change into the project cycle. The paper advocates giving greater attention to meeting these challenges within projects.