"It is time to empower women to truly develop Third World countries like the Philippines". This was the prevailing statement during the launch of the book Using Gender Research in Development: Food Security in Practice by International Food Policy Research Institute Senior Research Fellow Agnes Quisumbing at Miriam College last 29 August. The book launch was sponsored by the schools Women And Gender Institute. Using Gender Research in Development: Food Security in Practice can be downloaded for free at <http://www.ifpri.org> After the book launching, Isis International-Manila took the opportunity to sit down and interview Dr. Agnes Quisumbing on how gender research can provide solutions to the worlds development challenges. A portion of the interview is excerpted below.

On being asked what is gender research? How does it contribute to efforts of poverty alleviation and the upliftment of women's social status?

"Okay, first I think to understand what gender research is, we have to start with understanding what gender is. And gender is the way societies have constructed the relationship between men and women and how this socially-constructed relationship leads to differences in the division of rights, resources, and responsibilities between women and men within the household as well as in the public sphere.

"Doing gender research basically means paying attention to the relationship between men and women as a factor in determining outcomes as well as processes that characterise how societies operate, and how economies within societies operate.

"As a gender researcher studying, for instance, agricultural productivity, I might be more interested in whether it is the husband or the wife who owns the land, who makes a decision about how much fertiliser and pesticide or labour to put to the land, and whether the husband and his wife or sons and daughters work in the land. I think doing gender research allows you to have a more nuanced understanding of how life actually goes on.

"So, to turn to the second question, I think that whether we like it or not, gender discrimination is quite pervasive in the world and is associated with poor wellbeing for both men and for women.

"Closing the gender gap in many areas can contribute to poverty reduction. We have many studies that show this. For example, in Mozambique, providing primary schooling to women leads to a higher increase in poverty reduction (or reduces poverty more) than providing primary schooling to men. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where women do most of the food crop farming, equalising resources between women and men, particularly ensuring that all women go to primary school, can increase yields by as much 20 to 25%. So these are cases where if you eliminate these very basic gender gaps, you don't only benefit women, you also benefit men and their families.

"And I think that the impact is really strongest in the next generation. In a multi-country study that looked at Bangladesh, South Africa, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and other countries, we found that resources that were controlled by women were translated into better outcomes for their children."

In response to the question, What steps [need to be taken] be towards encouraging practitioners and policymakers to actually turn gender research into action? Dr. Quisumbing said:

"I think that the best incentive for them is to look at the examples where it has worked. I can give you two very famous examples, one from Asia and one from Latin America. The example from Asia is the Grameen Bank Microcredit Programme which has been for at least 20 years providing micro finance services to poor women who are organised into groups, and where the group serves as a guarantee for people borrowing because women are not allowed to own property. I think it has been very successful in changing women's lives, empowering them, and enabling them to accumulate savings and improve the lives of their families.

"Another example comes from the other side of the world which is the example of PROGRESA, the National Program for Education, Health, and Nutrition (Programa de Educacin, Salud y Alimentacin) in Mexico. What they did was to target cash transfers to the mother of the household on the condition that children go to school regularly, go to health visits and to also provide better health services and nutrition supplements to beneficiaries. This has had quite a significant impact in reducing child malnutrition, reducing morbidity for adults and children, increasing school enrollment. So there's been a quite large range of programmes that have worked because they have taken the gender issue into account."

Read the full interview: <www.isiswomen.org/pub/we/archive/quisumbing.html>