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Gender and Development (GAD) strategy adopted both in academia
and among governments of the Caribbean has served to highlight
the societal dimensions of gender and the consequential multi-faceted
policy responses required to address gender issues. But the
GAD strategy has also unintentionally contributed to a decline
in policy attention to women’s issues as concern for the
contrapuntal “male marginalisation” has emerged.
This has led to a worsening of women’s situation in some
Caribbean societies, though not necessarily to an improvement
in men’s situation. Influenced by the international development
agenda, feminist scholarship in the region has adopted the GAD
approach in its teaching, research, advocacy and activism. It
has succeeded in improving understanding of gender among governments
and ngos; influencing some government policymaking; isolating
the infrastructural requirements for successful gendered policymaking;
and identifying newly emerging development challenges, which
need to be addressed from a gender perspective. Among the latter
are included the HIV/AIDS pandemic, human rights abuses, poverty,
governance and leadership. The continued weakness of government
institutional machinery, the need for gender sensitive policy
reform and programme action and the limited development and
use of measures to monitor government accountability represent
the main contextual challenges. CGDS can, and must, provide
leadership in both sets of challenges if the key ingredient,
political will, is to be activated towards the attainment of
gender justice and equality in the 21st century in this region.
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