INTEGRATING GENDER EQUALITY
INTO THE HUMANITARIANDEVELOPMENT-PEACE NEXUS
Oxfam Canada’s nexus programming includes three stand-alone projects, implemented by local partner organizations1, with support from Oxfam country offices, and funded by Global Affairs Canada: Women Leading Durable Solutions (WLDS), Myanmar (2022-2027); Double Nexus Project in Tigray and Amhara, Ethiopia (2022-2024); Geared for Success (GFS), South Sudan and Uganda (2022-2027).
A. Document Summary
Strengthening progress as well as the evidence base around the Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) triple nexus approach remains a critical priority in both Canadian and International contexts. The need is equally urgent with respect to the integration of gender equality—through both gender mainstreaming and gender stand-alone programming—which continue to be underresearched, under-financed and poorly understood.2 Gender equality is essential to a nexus approach since persistent gender inequality limits effective and sustainably international engagement in humanitarian assistance, development actions and peace processes. This document seeks to address key evidence gaps by presenting practical examples and lessons learned from Oxfam Canada’s integration of gender equality and women’s rights into three nexus projects. It aims to clarify the what and the how of gender integration within the triple nexus, deepen understanding of this approach, and support practitioners in advancing more effective and inclusive programming.
Projects Overview
WOMEN LEADING DURABLE SOLUTIONS (WLDS)
(2022-2027)
MYANMAR: Rakhine State
(2022-2024)
ETHIOPIA: Amhara and Tigray regions
PARTNERS
Local partners are not listed for safety and security reasons
PARTNERS
• Women Empowerment Action (WE-Action)
• Mums for Mums
(2022-2027)
UGANDA: West Nile region: Yumbe, Terego and Obongi Districts South
SUDAN: Wau County (Western Bahr el Ghazal State), Malakal (Upper Nile State) and Awerial (Central-South region)
PARTNERS
• War Child Canada (WCC)
Uganda:
• Community Empowerment for Creative Innovation (CECI)
• Youth Social Advocacy Team (YSAT)
• Refugee-Led Organizations Network (RELON) South Sudan:
• Hope Agency for Relief and Development (HARD)
• Care for Children & Old Age in South Sudan (CCOSS)
• Upper Nile Youth Development Association (UNYDA)
B. Integration of Gender Equality into each project
Myanmar: WLDS
Women Leading Durable Solutions employs a triple-nexus approach to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment (GE/WE), particularly for internally displaced women, across multiple sectors including Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), livelihoods, protection and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). By integrating humanitarian assistance, long-term development and social cohesion to meet women’s needs, mitigate their vulnerabilities and address the underlying drivers of conflict. The promotion of GE/WE into the design and implementation of the activities include:
• promoting the professional development and personal growth and empowerment of women leaders through the Gender Leadership Programme (GLP);
• providing Women’s Leadership in WASH trainings to serve as a strategic entry point for leaders’ and community buy-in for gender equality;
• organizing community sensitization events on women’s rights and the social benefits of gender equality;
• networking and convening spaces for joint action planning facilitated with women;
• engaging male champions about gender equality and empowering them to support and advocate for balanced gender roles within their communities.
Ethiopia: Double Nexus Project in Tigray and Amhara
This project employed a humanitariandevelopment nexus approach while adding social cohesion elements to strengthen solidarity between internally displaced people (IDP) and host communities. It applied sequential programming3 by strategically targeting the same location(s) and community groups/structures, implementing
activities in an integrated manner, and supporting locally driven models of service provision and management. The promotion of GE/WE into the design and implementation of the activities include:
• supporting economic leadership and empowerment opportunities for women;
• providing unconditional cash grants to help atrisk women and girls to meet basic needs; and
• providing and strengthening essential sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) services including support for survivors of SGBV.
Uganda and South Sudan: GFS
Geared for Success aims to be gender transformative4 across the HDP triple nexus and aligns with national education policies, particularly those focusing on access to education, gender inclusivity and equality. By providing technical and financial support to community-based organizations led by refugees and IDP, Oxfam facilitated community ownership and engagement to strengthen local education systems and advocacy for policy reforms at the national level. Project activities that promote GE/WE include:
• facilitating an innovative, self-directed Capacity Assessment Tool (CAT)5 for refugee- and IDP-led organizations working on gender-responsive education;
• designing and delivering training modules and providing technical assistance based on themes identified in assessments and on self-identified institutional gaps;
• providing core, direct and multi-year small grants to refugee- and IDP-led organizations to help strengthen them and support genderresponsive education programming; and
• facilitating community engagement and dialogues with host communities, state institutions and policy makers on inclusive, gender-responsive education.
Keys to success
This section presents evidence and examples of the transformative impact of a nexus approach, drawing on three projects implemented by Oxfam Canada and funded by Global Affairs Canada. It examines the considerations involved in integrating gender equality within a nexus approach using a set of criteria derived from existing research and evaluations. These criteria reflect established expectations and evidence on effective nexus programming and are intended to provide practical, illustrative examples for practitioners:
• Community ownership
• Increased effectiveness and efficiency through better coordination
• Enhanced sustainability and resilience
• Addressing root causes
i. Community ownership
In a nexus approach, strategic partnerships of actors from humanitarian assistance, development cooperation and peacebuilding are essential to securing successful implementation; the differing skills and experiences can avoid duplication in programming and inefficiencies. But a nexus approach seeks to move beyond this, towards community-driven solutions and local ownership by involving local stakeholders in planning and implementation, ensuring interventions are relevant, appropriate, and sustainable. Community ownership is not possible without the meaningful participation of women.
The three projects explored various ways of working towards community ownership that is both strategic and intentional in seeking and incorporating the voices and decisions of women from the start, whether as community members, leaders, staff of CSOs or WROs. As all three projects highlight, there are numerous examples of how to build community ownership, including some that include working with women, including through community meetings, WASH committees
in WLDS, community-based protection committees in Ethiopia, prioritizing partnerships with WROs and capacity strengthening with them, and Self-Help Groups in Ethiopia (women-led savings/loans mechanisms).
Key learning:
The involvement of women and girls, including and most importantly women-led and women’s rights organizations, is crucial to success of a nexus approach since it can:
• provide an in-depth understanding of community needs and dynamics;
• ensure that programming is meeting the needs of women, children, elders, etc. Women in their care taking roles are more aware of community needs.
• strengthen linkages between existing humanitarian and development siloes, given the cross-cutting nature, and for sustainability;
• it can foster increased confidence, and community respect, while slowly working to shift restrictive social norms;
• it also helps build community buy-in for gender equality and women’s rights and foster trust between partners and communities.
ii. Increased effectiveness and efficiency through better coordination
A nexus approach can improve effectiveness and efficiency by strengthening coordination among governments, NGOs, and communities, reducing duplication and improving planning and implementation. Across the three projects, different coordination mechanisms were used, yet similar challenges emerged, including shrinking civic space, volatile humanitarian contexts, resistance to women’s participation, and security risks for women and girls. These experiences highlighted the importance of establishing clear coordination structures, roles, and decisionmaking responsibilities from the outset.
In Ethiopia, partners were physically present in project locations to strengthen coordination between humanitarian and development actors, complemented by regular coordination and monitoring meetings and engagement in the regional nexus coordination platform, relevant clusters and government offices. Despite these efforts, differing priorities and operational approaches continued to limit full alignment, underscoring the complexity of nexus programming and the need for ongoing adaptation and dialogue.
Moreover, rapid contextual changes increased risks and capacity constraints for women-led partners leading to potential delays and human resource constraints. Through flexible planning, sustained support, and, where necessary, direct implementation, Oxfam helped partners recover and rebuild. As a result, strengthened women-led organizations in Amhara and Tigray are now better equipped to address SGBV, SRH, and protection needs of highly vulnerable populations in targeted woredas6 .
Key learning:
Flexibility in implementation deadlines and funding is crucial when working with local and community-based organizations, and often more so for WLOs and WROs. Having a coordination plan, with detailed responsibility and communications channels, can help organizations better respond to needs in times of unexpected disruptions, including staffing transitions and leadership turnover. An environment that provides space for partners to rebuild in times of added crises will increase effectiveness of a response. Such was the case in Ethiopia with stronger women-led organizations. These challenges required many adjustments in management practices and adaptive strategies to keep activities on track across all outcomes.
iii. Addressing root causes
Implementing the triple nexus requires balancing immediate humanitarian needs with longterm development and peace objectives, while addressing the root causes of crises such as inequality, conflict, climate change, and poverty. This requires understanding local power dynamics and ensuring that local communities have the tools to shift them in favour of affected populations and those whose rights and needs are most often restricted, denied, forgotten, ignored and violated. Given that in most contexts, this includes women and girls, it is important to work on the root causes of gender inequality.
In South Sudan and Uganda, Oxfam, War Child Canada and their partners seek to addressed root causes of gender inequality by focusing on education and gender equality, tackling both structural barriers (such as weak policy implementation) and social norms. The approach integrated gender outcomes, GBV and SRHR
considerations, gender mainstreaming across the project cycle, engagement with women-led and women’s rights organizations, and mechanisms to prevent and report GBV.
Further, in Myanmar, work with refugee-led organizations, women and men, and community influencers strengthened long-term capacity to champion gender equality and women’s rights beyond the project’s lifespan. combined with other norm-changing activities, this will help adult and young women lead the development of informed solutions to address the barriers to gender equality and women’s empowerment, in collaboration with local stakeholders. Rights-based, genderresponsive tools and training developed through the project can be reused by WROs and CSOs and integrated into future programming, supporting sustainable, locally led change.
Key learning:
Addressing roots causes is integral to the nexus approach and is closely intertwined with the other key nexus criteria, including most directly with community ownership. A gender equality approach, underpinned by a GBA+ analysis, helps identify and address these structural causes, moving beyond immediate relief to tackle systemic issues. Success is often seen when:
• consulting and involving several stakeholders to promote and model social norm change
• working with champions of women’s and girls’ leadership
• keeping women and girls, men and boys at the core of the work
• expanding influencers to include religious and community leaders, alternative authorities and policymakers, other community decision makers and groups, WROs and CSOs, the media and relevant academic and research institutions.
iv. Better-Informed Programming
Shared analysis and information-pooling across sectors lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the context, needs, and risks, enabling better-tailored and conflict-sensitive strategies that “do no harm”. Ensuring better informed programming requires at a minimum a gender analysis and community-led participatory needs assessments. These should feed into a structured learning agenda to guide learning throughout the project cycle, with periodic moments of reflection built-in allowed the teams in Myanmar to assess how the programme was functioning, and whether course corrections were necessary.
The importance of conducting a gender analysis from which to base the projects is well understood by now in development and humanitarian settings; in conflict -affected contexts, a gender-sensitive conflict analysis can ensure that critical drivers of violence, exclusion, and resilience are not missed. For example, a GBV analysis conducted for GFS, and used to adapt the intervention, found that in South Sudan and Uganda, female learners, especially refugees and IDPs, face a myriad of social, cultural, gender and structural barriers to accessing and completing education. WCC and Oxfam conducted gender-based analyses (GBA+) in consultation with community stakeholders. The analysis highlighted how patriarchy, rooted in customary social practices, norms and institutions, was undermining young women’s and girls’, especially refugees’ and IDPs’, opportunities for education and making decisions for their own life. These findings were integral to the development of activities and partner selection.
For more information on our work and other learning briefs, visit:
• Women Leading Durable Solutions (WLDS)
• Geared for Success
Key learning:
Organizations should rethink monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL) approaches for nexus work. Current MEAL frameworks may not be ‘fit for purpose’ for nexus work. It is important to:
• Develop realistic and feasible outcomes and targets with built-in options for revisiting and adapting MEAL frameworks at regular intervals as a part of a learning cycle, including revisiting outcomes and targets, in response to changes in the context.
• Acknowledge from the outset that change is not linear, especially where GE is concerned, there will be setbacks that will affect our ability to achieve outcomes and meet targets set at the beginning of the project.
• Build in time and processes to document how the nexus approach is being implemented (criteria), what is working, what is not working so well.
• Create time for reflection and learning on nexus across the nexus pillars in an organization, or with other organizations.
• Advocate with donors for a different approach to MEAL for nexus projects, one that acknowledges uncertainty and allows for adaptive management, including of the performance management system, and taking a long-term view, recognizing that impact may not be visible for a generation.
Conclusion
This briefing strengthens existing evidence of the importance of integrating gender equality and women’s rights within the HDP nexus; Overall, the evidence from Oxfam Canada’s projects not only meets the critical short-term needs of women and girls in contexts of humanitarian crisis. Taking a nexus approach has proven positive impacts that are transformative for women and girls and are creating the conditions for longer-term peace, security and sustainability for their communities.
Furthermore, an analysis of existing programmes shows that integrated HDP approaches do deliver mutually reinforcing benefits for communities, particularly in protracted crisis contexts that experience periodic shocks. Mechanisms such as the WASH committees and self-help groups in Myanmar and Ethiopia, have proven more effective and manageable than siloed interventions. Multisectoral approaches—combining humanitarian assistance, economic recovery, and gender and protection interventions—have enabled more sustainable outcomes than would have been possible by a single modality alone. By embedding women’s leadership and engaging men as allies, these models address immediate needs while shifting social norms and strengthening community resilience, demonstrating the transformative potential of a nexus approach that integrates GE/WR. While this document represents a step forward in strengthening the evidence base, continued collective effort is essential. Deepening collaboration, encouraging the exchange of experiences, and creating spaces for practitioners to learn together will be critical to identifying what works and what does not work, and how nexus programming can be strengthened to integrate GE/WR and therefore achieve more sustainable, inclusive outcomes.
As Oxfam Canada continues implementing the GFS and WLDS projects, it is committed to improving the documentation, and to further sharing the lessons learned.
REFERENCES
OECD. (2021) “Gender equality across the humanitarian development peace nexus”, OECD Development Perspectives, No. 7, OECD Publishing, Paris.
Infante, Vittorio. (2021). Transforming the Systems that Contribute to Fragility and Humanitarian Crises: Programming across the triple nexus Oxfam.
den Heyer, Molly and Tomlinson, Brian. (2024). “Canadian CSOs and the Triple Nexus: A review of Canadian CSO experiences in HumanitarianDevelopment-Peace Nexus programming in fragile and conflict-affected countries”, A Study Commissioned by The CSO Nexus Working Group of the Canadian Food Security Policy Group.
Fanning, Emma and Fullwood-Thomas, Jessica, (2019). The HumanitarianDevelopment-Peace Nexus: What does it mean for multi-mandated organizations? Oxfam.
GAPS, Oxfam, Action Aid. (2023). “The Humanitarian-Peace-Development Nexus”, Beyond Feminist Foreign Policy Series, Briefing 4.
ICVA. (2018). “What is the Triple Nexus?”, Learning Stream: Navigating the Nexus Topic 1: The “nexus” explained.
United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security. (2021). Realizing the triple nexus: Experiences from implementing the human security approach
1 Oxfam does not publicly list all its local partners for safety and security reasons, primarily to protect individuals and organizations working in high-risk, politically sensitive, or conflict-affected regions.
2 Oxfam recognizes that recognize that there can be no economic, social, and environmental justice without gender justice and takes a rights-based approach to transforming the dynamics that produce and perpetuate fragility and inequality.
3 Sequential programming refers to a structured, phased, and logical ordering of interventions, such as relief, recovery, and development.
4 In Oxfam’s gender justice work, transformation refers to seeking fundamental change in gender norms and the underlying structural causes of inequality in societies.
5 Launched in 2009, the CAT has been used in 12 GACfunded projects, in the areas of SRHR, women’s voice and leadership (WVL), women’s economic empowerment (WEE) and ending GBV. Oxfam Canada’s approach to capacity strengthening is innovative as it contributes to better results/impacts, sustainability and supports organizational innovation.
6 In Ethiopia, districts are also called woredas. They are the third level of administrative divisions, after zones and the regional states.
This learning series is commissioned by Oxfam Canada with financial support from the Government of Canada through Global Affairs Canada. Authors: Carol Miller and Julie Lafreniere. Contributors: Asma Siyala, Kimia Ghomeshi, Sharmin Ahmed, Andrea Szenasi, Waeil Musa (Oxfam Canada). Design: Jenny Walker.
