A Norwegian volunteer examines the connections between gender and technical assistance

by Jorgen Bollingmo

“Could there be a bakla-Obama in the Philippines of today…”

On new year’s eve almost a year ago I left the freezing north and headed for the well-tempered capital of a country almost a day’s journey (by plane) away. My goal was a general one: to see, hear, experience, and learn as much as I possibly could in the precious little time I had (I only stayed for a bit less than 4 months). I wanted real-life experience to supplement my academic knowledge and to break out of my European bubble. I wanted to get to know an entirely new country; I wanted to find out how gender is and can be made relevant in a development context and to figure out what my contribution to sustainable development should be; and to get to know myself a little bit better.

At the TAO office I worked on an exploratory paper on gender sensitivity in development work (in technical assistance work in particular), under the Research and Publications program. The aim of the project was to develop an introductory manual and a resource guide of sorts for TAO staff to use and apply as they see fit.

Some might wonder why gender should be a concern for development workers at all. Is it not secondary to the provision of basic human necessities like food and shelter? The answer I would give is that the two things are inseparable. Secure provision of these goods for everyone also means ensuring equal access to them. Gender often stands in the way of this. Gender relations dictate who gets to make important decisions, who gets to work and with what, who gets to be in charge of family property, and the list goes on. In a developing country context, equalizing gender relations can be a question of securing everyone’s equal right to good health, to property, to earn an income to sustain oneself and one’s family, and so on. Gender equality is a development goal in itself, as the UN Millennium Development Goals also reflect.

But what practical tools do development workers have and what tools should they have at hand to reach this goal? It is a relatively easy thing to get everyone to agree on the need for sustainable shelter, effective and environmentally friendly systems for waste disposal, and the like. In terms of solutions to such problems (and the discovery of new ones), technology and the natural sciences willingly lend us their hands. But agreeing on the rules that should govern gender relations and developing quick-and-easy tools to get rid of often deep-rooted structures of inequality might prove to be a tad more difficult.

One of the major challenges I faced while working on the project was making the connection between my academic understanding of gender and the very concrete and practical needs of the development context. The great thing about the academe is that one is allowed to play around with concepts and develop radical and potentially groundbreaking ideas of how the world works, how it should work and what can be done to change it towards a desired direction. The bad thing is that one is rarely confronted with real people who often have a very different understanding of the challenges they face and of the best way to face them. You never know if the ground will break the way you would like it to. Theory and reality rarely make a perfect fit.

I also discovered that the available literature on the topic has certain limitations. One of these has to do with the more general question of case transferability; gender means different things to different people, and so guidelines for gender sensitive housing in South Africa or Brazil are useful only to a certain extent when applied to a Philippine context. Another weakness was content-related: it was often not at par with theoretical developments in the academic field. In gender studies today, researchers often look beyond the traditional and simplistic man-woman divide to the more complex opportunity structures that our manifold and paradoxical gendered expectations of both ourselves and others contribute in creating. Could there be a bakla-Obama in the Philippines of today, for instance?

And so, I found myself spending a lot of time trying to navigate in an unfamiliar landscape, outside of both my academic and cultural comfort zone. As I wrapped up and got on my plane back to Norway it felt like I had only just begun.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jorgen Bollingmo is now residing in Norway, pursuing his interest in gender and development with a particular focus on the Southeast Asian region, as part of an MS in Political Science at the University of Oslo. His main non-academic interests lie in queer politics and singing (preferably with live music, but Manila did make him love karaoke almost as much). He fell in love with the Philippines during his 2008 visit, and the longing to go back grows stronger each day as the Norwegian winter approaches.