Every Gender Sensitive Indicator is supposed to measure the gap between men and women; the different roles, responsibilities and access to resources of different members of society; gauge progress towards achieving gender equality goals. Others are to encourage the integration of gender equality issues; disaggregate data by sex, age and other variables as well as demonstrate the impact of changes in power relations between women and men. So the question is how can we design projects to reflect these diversities and capture all these little details without our gender lenses?

The Gender lens is an imaginary eye one must adopt in order to see the very little gender disparities in our project design. Some participants of a gender training organised by Oxfam for focal persons and partners from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ghana stressed the importance of catching little facts that are usually ignored in our project development stage as a result of looking through things without the gender lens.

Wairimu Munyinyi, a participant from Sierra Leone attested that although she has been a gender focal person for long time she still needs to critically analyse issues before getting the right gender perspective.
 
As an organization that is interested in gender equality, Oxfam Ghana has organized a three day gender training on gender analysis, budgeting and project designing with indicators that are workable and sensitive to addressing gender disparities and to equip key staff members on the Gender and Development toolkit to enable them replicate the training in their respective countries.
 
Story by Naana Nkansah Agyekum, Media and Communications Officer, Oxfam in Ghana