Analysis of Gender and Indigenous Issues with Regard to USAID/Bolivia’s 2005-2009 Strategy

The USAID/Bolivia Mission has made significant progress in integrating gender into its new strategy, into most of its activities, and into recent RFAs and RFPs for new and follow-on activities. This report is intended as a resource guide to support the Mission in its subsequent efforts to ensure that gender and sociocultural issues are integrated into the new activities under the recently approved strategy. Therefore, the report provides: 1) illustrative statistical information on gender and ethnic disparities in economic and social sectors; 2) comments on the Strategy by sector with suggestions for strengthening some of the strategic directions of the Missions program with regard to gender and sociocultural inclusion; 3) a summary of project-level interventions that support gender and sociocultural inclusion; 4) published and web-based resources on gender and indigenous issues by sector; and 5) training materials used in the workshop on August 17, 2004 in Spanish and English. A logical next step in this process would be to work with individual SO Teams and their activity implementers to develop action plans for gender and sociocultural inclusion. Many current activities, such as Bolfor and Concade already have gender action plans, and many others, such as most of the health and democracy programs have gender strategies or components. There is an opportunity, with new activities, to make sure that gender and indigenous issues are integrated directly into initial work plans and start-up activities and into project-level monitoring and evaluation plans.