Gender Inclusion Strategies in PNPM

The Program Nasional Pemberdayaan
Masyarakat (PNPM) or National Community Empowerment Program
is the world’s largest program of its kind with long term
goals to reduce poverty by making development planning more
inclusive, accountable, and reflective of local needs. PNPM
currently covers about 70,000 rural and urban communities
across Indonesia. PNPM works by giving communities block
grants to spend on projects developed through a
participatory, bottom-up planning process, facilitated by
social and technical specialists who provide advice to
communities without controlling funds. PNPM is supported by
a multi-donor trust fund called the PNPM Support Facility
(PSF). Part of PSF’s role is to provide more effective
strategic support to the government’s objectives, especially
by improving the effectiveness of PNPM’s gender action plan.
Increasing women’s voice in community planning and
decision-making has been an explicit goal of PNPM since its
founding, and since 2007 PNPM Rural has had an overarching
gender action plan to guide actions to involve women in all
procedures. A maximum of 25 per cent of all PNPM funds are
reserved to support proposals from village women’s groups
for RLF groups referred to in this report as SPP. Women play
increasingly central roles in PNPM’s kecamatan and village
administration. The PSF engaged a gender specialist with
expertise in working in challenging rural contexts to review
the system and provide a short critical report and practical
recommendation on gender sensitive approaches in the overall
implementation of PNPM Rural. A PSF operational analyst with
in depth knowledge of PNPM accompanied the specialist to the
field. Objectives and outputs are laid out in full in
described in Appendix 6. The report below lays out the
findings and recommendations of the mission.