SEXUALITY AND DEVELOPMENT
A PROPOSAL FROM THE INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
FOR A PROGRAMME OF WORK 2007-2010
18th November 2007
Contacts: Susie Jolly and Andrea Cornwall
SUMMARY
Effective policies on sexuality and development require both an authoritative evidence base and dynamic multi-stakeholder communications to achieve the greater realisation of sexual rights and access to basic services in relation to the achievement of MDGs 3, 5 and 6. This means influencing policy debates and processes to take into account the specific context in which people live, including howsexuality isexperienced, and how it is constructedby the social, economic and cultural environment. For example, what economic interests and what norms around control of women’s bodies lead to adolescent marriage of girls? How do girls themselves experience these relationships? How do inequalities and norms around masculinity affect sexual violence? This three year programme aims to develop and share knowledge and understanding so that these questions are answered and addressed to generate practical policy solutions.
The Super Goal of this programme is the greater realisation of sexual rights, including in relation to HIV/AIDS and SRH, particularly for those facing poverty and injustice. The goal is to enable development interventions to more effectively support realisation of sexual rights and access to basic services in relation to these particularly forthe poor. The purpose is to strengthen evidence-based policy and programmes relating to sexuality and development.
The programme will be operational in Brazil, China, South Africa and India. It will bring sexuality researchers, NGOs and activists into policy arenas and support their engagement with the governments of these countries, as well as with bilateral and multilateral institutions at global as well as specific country level. Its main outputs consist of:
1. Effective policy engagement
2. Capacity strengthening through the development of new skills, tools and capabilities
3. Operational analysis to inform policy and practice
4. Effective monitoring and evaluation system
The total budget proposed is GBP 300 thousand over three years. While there is some complementarity between the work proposed in this programme and other IDS-based initiatives such as the Realising Rights and Women’s Empowerment RPCs, this programme is an entirely separate initiative and there will be no duplication in dissemination, funding or activities.
CONTENTS
1. BACKGROUND AND JUSTIFICATION
How did we come to be involved?
The problem to be addressed
Primary and secondary stakeholders
Partners in country
Links with donor country offices
II. OBJECTIVES
III. ACTIVITIES AND OUTPUTS
Output 1. Effective policy engagement
Output 2. Capacity strengthening through the development of new skills, tools and capabilities
Output 3. Operational analysis to inform policy and practice
IV. MONITORING, REPORTING AND EVALUATION PROCEDURES
IDS
Why IDS?
Advisory Group
Risk Assessment
ANNEX 1. COUNTRY ACTIVITIES
Brazil – the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA)
China – Pink Space Culture and Development Centre
India –Nirantar Centre for Gender and Education
South Africa – University of KwaZulu Natal
1. BACKGROUND AND JUSTIFICATION
How did we come to be involved?
This programme arises out of a trajectory of engagement with issues of sexuality and development at IDS and with partners in the global south over a number of years. This has enabled us to build extensive linkages with networks, organizations and individuals across the globe.
Under previous grants to the Participation Group at IDS, including with the previous support of DFID and with the ongoing support of Sida and SDC, a range of activities have been pursued that have demonstrated the value and tapped into a considerable interest in the linkages between sexuality and development. These have included a series of studies on HIV/AIDS and sexuality, sex worker participation in programming sexuality and rights-based approaches, sexuality and social exclusion and exploratory work on the linkages between sexuality and development. This has been complemented by communications initiatives supported by BRIDGE, including an inBrief on Sexuality, an IDS Policy Briefing on Sexuality and Development, and the acclaimed Cutting Edge Pack on Sexuality, and a Health Systems Information Resource Guide on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights.
With funding from DFID, Sida, SDC, the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ford Foundation, we held a landmark workshop atIDS in September 2005. Entitled ‘Realizing Sexual Rights’, the workshop brought together a diversity of practitioners, academics, policy actors and activists to explore the connections between sexuality and development, and to debate the utility of a rights-based approach to sexuality - 60 participants from Austria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Egypt, the Gambia, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Serbia, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, UK, USA, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.
We realised that this workshop was breaking new ground, permitting a conversation between those involved in research, advocacy and practical training and programming work. This conversation bridged the gaps between a more narrow perspective on sexual rights as the rights of sexual minorities and a broader, more inclusive, perspective on the rights of sexual majorities and on the realities of the vulnerability of married women. Significantly, holding this conversation in IDS brought to the fore the urgent need to engage development researchers and practitioners with issues of sexuality. The realisation that the relationship between sexuality and developmentextends to economic growth, human security, access to basic services and broader issues of governance, including political participation, underscored how much needed to be done to make these connections explicit.
We came away from this experience convinced of the need for more work to be done to explore and make explicit sexuality-development linkages for evidence-based policy advocacy, networking, communications and the development of new training approaches that can be used at all levels, from people living in poverty to the policy communities who make the decisions that affect poor people’s lives. The question in our minds was who would be in a position to co-ordinate this work. It became evident in our discussions with a range of southern and northern organizations that although everyone identified a need for an initiative with multi-continental reach that could convene practitioners and policy actors and turn lessons from practice into accessible communications outputs and tools, none of these organizations felt that they had the capacity or the proximity to international development actors that we have at IDS.
In the two years since we held this workshop, we have been developing this programme proposal so as to take this agenda forward. We have, during this period, continued to build up on and consolidate partnerships and links with donors and development institutions, and have co-ordinated two further international events: on ‘Sexuality, Human Rights and Development: Making the Linkages’ in Stockholm, in April 2006, hosted by the Expert Group on Development Issues of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Sweden, and ‘Politicizing Masculinity: Beyond the Personal’ in Dakar in October 2007, in partnership with the Senegalese National Alliance of HIV/AIDS organizations ANCS, and with funding from the Norwegian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Ford Foundation, UNFPA, UNAIDS, Sida and SDC.
The strategic advantage of this programme is the access we have both to the development community via our close connections with IDS and our links with international development agencies, and with cutting edge activists and practitioners in the south who are breaking new ground in their work on masculinities, sex worker engagement, HIV/AIDS prevention with hard-to-reach or otherwise neglected groups.
Building on our connections and experience, this programme offers a unique opportunity to provide what the donors, practitioners and activists with whom we have interacted over these years are asking for: accessible communications targeted at policy audiences that can communicate effectively why sexuality matters for development, and what might be done to make a tangible difference to the lives of poor people.
The problem to be addressed
Development agencies have made progress on work on sexuality
Sexuality has always had a place on the development agenda. From concerns about the interactions between population and environment, to efforts to promote reproductive health rights and responses to the AIDS pandemic, sex and sexuality have implicitly been at the heart of much development work. The shift towards a rights-based approach to development has brought the human rights dimensions of sexuality into clearer view, and with it the need to address discriminatory laws as well as gross violations of the human rights of sexual minorities. Rights around sexuality have been recognised in international fora, notably in the ICPD, Beijing Platform for Action, and in relation to the MDGs, as in the Stockholm Call to Action in 2005. Such agreements are hugely important for legitimising support for sexual rights in development.
Yet sexuality continues to be marginalised, and the linkages with poverty, well-being and growth remain unrecognised
Yet the mainstream of development fails to recognise the importance of sexuality, and the links with poverty, growth and well-being. Those making the case that these interlinkages exist, and that sexuality is a key aspect of development, lack systematic evidence to support their arguments. There is widespread recognition of the threat that sexual ill health poses to the economy, security and human well-being more generally. HIV/AIDS takes approximately 3 million lives each year, and health complications around sex, reproduction and pregnancy are among the leading causes of death among women in developing countries. But there is less acknowledgement of the role that pressure to conform to norms around sexuality plays in influencing well-being, including in contributing to ill-health, but also in other ways.
Those who are marginalised from dominant norms around sexuality - such as lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender and intersex people, sex workers, single women, women who have sex outside of marriage, and non-macho men - may face not only pressure to conform, but stigma, discrimination and violence if they do not. Those who are integrated into dominant norms of sexuality may also pay a price – for example if they undergo genital mutilation, early marriage, or engage in unequal and unsatisfying heterosexual relationships. These connections remain unrecognised in many policies and programmes. As a result the effectiveness of interventions are hampered, and people continue to be denied their sexual rights, in particular poor people who often have fewer means to claim such rights in the first place.
In order to design more effective development interventionswe need to adress the contexts in which people live, including howsexuality isexperienced, and how it is constructedby the social, economic and cultural environment. Examples include the economic interests and norms around control of women’s bodies leading to adolescent marriage of girls and how girls themselves experience these relationships, as well as the economic and other inequalities and norms around masculinity that affect sexual violence. This programme aims to develop and share understanding and knowledge which addresses such issues and leads to practical solutions.
Sexuality continues to be dealt with in negative disempowering ways
The Swedish Foreign Ministry Policy on sexual and reproductive health and rights (2006) notes the limitations of current approaches: ‘When questions concerning sexuality are discussed in international contexts, the debate often focuses on problems and negative effects. In many cases, the positive, life-affirming and life quality enhancing factors are ignored.’ (p6)
What is clear from the last few decades is the inadequacy of approaches to sexuality that emphasise its more negative and frightening elements. Such approaches can be disempowering – for example by reinforcing women’s vulnerability rather than building capacity to resist this vulnerability.
They can also be ineffective in promoting safer sex. Some of the main reasons people have sex is to seek pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction and intimacy. If condoms or other kinds of safety measures are perceived as obstructing these, it is very hard to promote them. Yet most safer sex promotion initiatives focus only on risk reduction. The pleasure enhancing aspects of safer sex also need to be promoted.
However, more positive approaches are beginning to be used. The ‘Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies’ in Middle East and South East Asia is framing sexuality in terms of positive rights to sexual and bodily integrity, rather than simply taking positions against honour killings or content of personal codes. ‘The Pleasure Project’ has produced a global mapping of pleasure focussed projects which outlines a number of initiatives which use pleasure to promote safer sex particularly in resource poor settings (see
There is much to be learnt from exploring such approaches further. One of the challenges for practice is how to move towards more empowering approaches to sexuality. Can we dispense with scare tactics and messages of doom and gloom and talk instead about desire and pleasure, and create the space for people to find safer, more fulfilling and respectful ways of relating to each other?
Communication is lacking between sexual rights activists and those working in development
There are many important, although often small scale, initiatives by activists and NGOs, often with the support of development programmes taking forward work on sexual rights relevant to poor and marginalised populations. These include work on sex worker and LGBT issues, particularly in relation to HIV/AIDS, supported by bilaterals such as the DFID and DGIS (Dutch); the Ford Foundation-sponsored regional resource centres on sexuality[1] as well as much exciting activism, lobbying, and networking at local, national and regional levels (see the IDSCutting Edge Pack on ‘Gender and Sexuality’ which presents many such cases at
However, exchange between and learning from these different actors working in different areas of sexuality remains limited, and their input into more mainstream development concerns such as growth and poverty reduction remains constrained. Connections between development actors and those working with issues of sexuality are urgently needed. Energy, ideas and innovations need to be harnessed in a concerted effort to put sexuality firmly onto the development agenda
Primary and secondary stakeholders
Primary stakeholders
Primary stakeholders are people marginalised for breaking rules around sexuality, or paying the price to conform to rules which do not suit their needs and which may relegate them to unequal status. This programme will benefit them through bringing about a shift in development industry practise which will lead to
- greater effectiveness of development interventions through understanding and taking into account how sexuality is lived and constructed, and the connections with well being
- more possibilities, particularly for poorer people, to voice their needs and priorities in relation to sexual rights, and for these to be listened to by development agencies and other institutions
Secondary stakeholders
Principal secondary stakeholders are NGOs and sexual rights activists in that this programme aims to build opportunities and spaces for them to be heard by and influence development policy actors. The programme will seek to engage a range of NGOs and activist partners. Other stakeholders are governments and donors in the countries where the programme will be operating , as well as the international development community more widely, including the global headquarters of bilateral and multilateral institutions.
Partners in country
The Sexuality and Development Programme will interact with four core partners, and a wider satellite network of advisors and supporters drawn from our extensive global network of researchers, practitioners and activists working in the field of sexual health and rights. We have chosen to focus initially on four countries that for reasons of the extent of innovative practice and potential lessons to be learnt, strategic importance, population and potential impact on policy, and degree of potential influence within their regions, offer in our view some of the best opportunities for amplifying the influence of a programme of this size.
Our key contacts in each organization are people with an established track record of innovative and influential work, and the partnership will provide us with a means of working directly with them and, through the links they have in-country, for engaging with a broader network of practitioners within governmental and non-governmental organizations, researchers, activists and international donors.
The Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA/AIDS),Brazil. Key contact: Sonia Correa, Research Associate.