Practice of Implementing Gender Mainstreaming in Human Resources Management: the case of CARE Ethiopia
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Date
2014-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study assessed the Practice and Challenges of Implementing Gender Mainstreaming in CARE Ethiopia, investigating the major factors which resulted for the significant gender imbalance between male and female staffs while the organization has been known by ‘gender activist’. The study used a qualitative research method that could help to make extensive review on the research problem and as a result to come-up with the real causes of the organization’s gender gap. To gather the necessary data, the study employed interview, document review and observation. Twenty five respondents were purposely selected as informants of the research; among these respondents four key respondents were selected for in depth interview and others were reflected their responses for open ended questions. The respondent selection was made from the top, middle and lower levels of the organization structure eventually helps to triangulate the informants’ reflection. CARE Ethiopia is a humanitarian organization mainly working on poverty alleviation and nations’ development at large. In its development strategy, gender mainstreaming is one of the major development agenda and it remains the organization as an activist since its operation started in Ethiopia in 1984. Nevertheless, after all these years, the percentage of female staffs is only 20%. This percentage makes CARE Ethiopia country office the least from the East and Central Africa CARE Country Offices and also with most of the humanitarian organization working in Ethiopia. The organization has professional gender advisors in most of the organization intervention programs; the Advisors are fully engaged in the organization’s gender mainstreaming programs which are related to the community where the program implemented rather than the internal gender mainstreaming objective. Most importantly, the human resource management policy has a big role to the organization mainstreaming strategy; however, the recruitment and administration policy found inadequate to strengthen the gender mainstreaming policy. Hence, unless the organization revise the gender mainstreaming strategy, recruitments policy and the role of the Gender Advisor, it would be difficult to curb the current gender imbalance ration in the organization
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Gender Studies