Gender Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Development (Gender LEAD)

Situation or Background
The Gender LEAD program, under USAID’s Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Hub (GenDev), provided thought leadership on how to consider, evaluate, and address the ways in which USAID country-level investments shaped and were shaped by gender influences. Gender LEAD was led by ECODIT and four technical partners: GEH, Iris Group, MCI, and PRB.

Our Goal or What We’re Doing
GEH demonstrated the ways in which gender norms—the informal rules in society about how women and men should be and act—linked to development priorities of addressing persistent inequities in health, education, governance, and economic growth.

Approach or Methodology
Our team:

• Conducted norms-informed gender analyses. We reviewed scientific and gray literature to identify context-specific gender norms. We provided examples of how norms shaped development priorities, and recommended ways that USAID staff, implementing partners, and country-level stakeholders could address restrictive norms.
• Created norms guidance documents. We synthesized evidence on how to integrate gender norms research and best-practices across the project lifecycle to advance structural change across the USAID investment portfolio.
• Provided technical assistance on norms integration. We advised Gender LEAD on how to apply a gender-transformative lens to every phase of the research-to-policy and practice process to address gender inequities at their root.

Impact and What We’re Learning
Through Gender LEAD, GEH helped clarify the role of gender norms in USAID’s assessments of how development projects and policies might affect different genders in distinct ways. This helped to ensure that development interventions were aware of the societal expectations placed on women, men, and those of other gender identities, and how those norms shaped policies and programs across the globe.