The Role of Gender Indicators in Rural Development Programmes

This paper contributes to the debate among policymakers, development practitioners and researchers on the potential value, applicability and effectiveness of gender indicators in rural settings of southern countries, highlighting both the main obstacles and the most recent attempts to develop new and more insightful indicators. In brief the paper starts to present a general overview of the main multidimensional gender-indicators elaborated until now, highlighting their key aspects, which clearly reflect the changing ideas about gender issues in rural development, but also their limits such as the lack of specificity. Secondly, we present our attempt to develop indicators that may support rural gender projects and policies at local and regional level, explaining how we managed to address the many technical and political problems encountered . Third, we stress which are the next steps to proceed with, in particular the need to test these proposed indicators in the field, as well as the necessity to include a more qualitative and participatory perception analysis about what, why and how much is considered important to measure by the local beneficiaries of the project, in order to face the subjective and external visions of empowerment.