Summary:
There is now comprehensive evidence demonstrating gender differences in access to opportunities, resources and participation across the range of civic services and social and economic life chances. Women are weakly represented in decisionmaking, are disproprortionately burdened with task loads, have least mobility with which to access centralised services and have least access to decentralised services in both rural and urban locations. And the pattern is global. Women are socially excluded from their proportionate share of the health and wealth of their societies: including women in decisions about rural infrastructure services is a precondition to ensure scarce public resources positively affect the livelihood of poor people.

The focus on social inclusion draws attention to the need for active intervention in governance and social processes of resource allocation to rectify this inequity. The social inclusion discourse has developed in Europe, been widely incorporated in rural and resource planning within Europe and been imported by the development agencies and international institutions into their policy language. The consideration of gender, social inclusion and rural infrastructure services necessitates the identification of gender disparities in access to rural infrastructure services and the identification of the consequences of such disparities (poor health, poverty, crippling task loads, time poverty, agricutural impoverishment, accommodation insecurity); it also necessitates the identification of points of intervention and of good project, program and policy practice for rectifying and correcting disparities which have negative social and economic effects.

'Exclusion' and 'inclusion' focus on participation and the extension of participation as a necessary component of the attack on poverty. The application of this largely European framework in the developing world has resulted in a beneficial extension and transformation of the understanding of participation and a new concept of participation - participant management - has emerged in locations such as Brazil and South Africa.

Discussions of what indicators precisely capture 'social exclusion' are absent from the literature (and indeed as social exclusion is a relational concept we might reasonably expect these indicators to vary from political context to political context), however, in respect of gender, social inclusion and rural infrastructure services, gender responsive budget analysis would provide us with an important universal tool.

Finally, the two countries evidencing rapid movement in the development of participant management - Brazil and South Africa - both demonstrate low income use of information communications technology: the time has come to consider information communications technology as a fundamental part of rural infrastructure and to think in terms of unmet information and participation needs in a manner parallel to contraception or highway development or universal education. Developments in information technology can be utilised to reduce rural social exclusion across a range of activities: hand held, solar powered, satellite linked technologies can perform a range of functions from information provision on market prices for small farmers to the calling of emergency medical assistance to environmental management.

Power point presentation: http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/rural.ppt

Introduction
The issue of gender, social inclusion and rural infrastructure services has many aspects. The recorded differentials in men and women's experience of rural life and living are in abundance and across the range of survival activities with women almost universally enjoying the poorer menu. Women are socially excluded across the full range of social, economic and political opportunities if social exclusion is viewed as substantially weaker access than their counterpart men. Exclusion from each set and sector of activities has consequences for their participation in another. Exclusion from education has its consequences for participation in governance and decision making - and simultaneously exclusion from participation in governance has consequences for the full participation of women in the education sector. Exclusion from education and governance perpetuates gender roles which result in women bearing the brunt of inadequate rural infrastructure: women's time and labour are routinely used in the developing world as substitutes for infrastructural provision which is standard elsewhere. The consequences is that women's time is directed into survival activities which have a low productive value within cash economies. Improving rural infrastructure can, if correctly implemented, free up women's time for more productive activities.

The interaction between the various dimensions of social exclusion requires 'joined up' policies of intervention for the resolution of such inequities - social inclusion requires coordinated intervention across the gamut of domains in which social exclusion exists. Two key policies seem to be worth our attention in beginning to address social inclusion in the rural sector: gender responsive budget analysis and participant management in the context of transparent governance. Gender responsive budget analysis provides a check or overview of the allocation of resources by policy makers and other key institutional actors and agencies and so provides an indicator of policy attention to the reduction of social exclusion in respect of women: participant management ensures that women have appropriate decision making roles in respect of the resources allocated to the reduction of their social exclusion. Precisely which projects are required in any particular location is a consequence of contextual factors but the policy requirements for gender responsive budget analysis and participant management are universal.

Topics:
Within the context sketched above this issue note addresses the following topics -

• Time;
• Transport;
• Health;
• Water access and management;
• Pipe borne services and electrification;
• Secure accommodation;
• Social security;
• Banking and credit;
• Access to extension activities and resources;
• Education;
• Gender responsive budget analysis;
• Access to information and communications technology;
• Decision making and participation.

Before moving to a discussion of each of these topics in turn, a brief discussion of the terms 'gender', 'social inclusion' and 'rural infrastructure services' is given below.

Gender:
'Gender' is a concept which addresses systematic socially constructed differences in life chances and life conditions of women and men.

Social exclusion and social inclusion:
The literature on social exclusion and social inclusion is a recent development and has been generated mainly in the context of the developed world ( Definition of social inclusion for librarians http://www.la-hq.org.uk/groups/csg/si/si.html ). It addresses deep differences and persisting inequalities in the civic, social, political, economic and health experience of the citizens within developed countries, most particularly Europe. The social exclusion/inclusion discussion is useful in that it does not simply focus upon the observed patterns of difference between social categories but it attends to the social processes of decision making and participation and exclusion from these processes and the role of such exclusion in entrenching divisions. Out of a debate developed in Europe in the context of the attack on poverty within Europe through European Structural funds has come a substantial discourse on social exclusion and social inclusion and extended participation. The relational language of social exclusion has been imported into the global development discourse on poverty and from other locations outside of Europe new terms and practices have married with social inclusion and social exclusion terminology and produced projects, programs and discourses which focus on participant management such as in Brazil and South Africa. Redressing exclusion and promoting inclusion is necessarily about extending participation and moving beyond the view of the poor or disadvantaged or deprived as a client for services - it is about the active involvement of all users of all resources in the decision making process.

Rural infrastructure services:
The time has come to rethink rural infrastructure services - and to factor in access to information and communications technology. Rural infrastructure services can not simply be about village level infrastructure. And the evidence is that in many locations such a rethinking has begun - for example, Brazil and South Africa. Historically, physical transport and communications were poor in rural locations as compared with their urban counterparts. Colonial relationships of extraction left many developing countries with inefficient and highly imbalanced transport and communication structures - fast transport corridors were tied to extractive industries such as mining or export crops with little focus being placed on developing nationally equitable transport and communications structures post decolonisation. Providing modern transport and communication structures in the post colonial period was an expensive undertaking with the consequence that many locations in Africa are poorly served in terms of motorised transport and electrical provision. The prospects of solar power and hand held, satellite linked, digital technologies open up new rural infrastructure services which can assist the disadvantaged of remote locations to enter and benefit from the modern ICT (Information communications technology) world. Through such technologies information can be obtained on market prices which assist small farmers in bargaining for the right price for their crops, medical assistance can be summoned in times of crisis, better banking and credit arrangements can be organised (both the Grameen bank in Bangladesh and the Self Employed Women's Association in Gujarat, India, have begun to make use of these technologies in reducing the social exclusion of women).

Topic 1.Time:

As research in Bangladesh - http://www.foundation.novartis.com/social_development/women_development.htm - has revealed, time pressures play an important role in intensifying women's institutional powerlessness. Low status is typically coupled with a heavy task burden and this heavy task burden reduces the energy and time available to the individual woman or communities of women for challenging the existing distribution of respect, reward and resources. Protocols and procedures are required for ensuring that women are enabled to 'make time' for participation in project management and decisionmaking: India's legislation -http://www.kas.de/publikationen/2001/frauen/raman.pdf - requiring quotas of female village political representatives appears to be one such successful innovation. In the context of time, poor rural infrastructure increases women's task burden and improvements in rural infrastructure can bring time benefits to women in terms of labour saving technologies. It is, however, important to ensure that the time so released is not simply directed into yet another type of low status, time hungry task performance -http://www.unrisd.org/engindex/publ/news/18eng/jackson.htm. The poor quality of data available in respect of gender and time budgets in developing countries is still a topic of considerable discussion - http://www.ifpri.cgiar.org/themes/mp17/gender/news5-1/news51d.htm

Topic 2.Transport:

Poor transport intensifies the task burdens of women and the impact of poor transport in a context of centralised resources further intensifies task burdens and time poverty. This is particularly the case where women are themselves forms of transport headloading fuel, water, agricultural produce and household goods in the absence of access to other forms of transport. The price of poor access and poor rural infrastructure including transport is wasted time as the ILO has noted http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/recon/eiip/publ/1998/ratp3/. Accessibility planning is key in undertaking the reduction of gender based social exclusion in rural locations in developing countries. The provision of roads where local communities neither have resources to maintain the road not have the necessary income to travel on motorised vehicles is problematic. Road building must be matched by measures which enable the vulnerable to make use of such facilities before it can be viewed as a social inclusion measure: historically this condition has not been well met. The development of new fleet management technologies combined with information communication technologies open up the prospect of new forms of transport organisation in additional to conventional transport markets such as community transport and demand responsive transport. The new technologies enable a pooling of resources amongst a wider set of communities in the joint operation of a vehicle or vehicles and enables the multi-use of public service vehicles.

Topic 3.Health:

Gender, health and poverty are strongly interconnected and there is a strong rural dimension but according to WHO - http://www.who.int/inf-fs/en/fact251.html - the appropriate detailed studies and data collection of rural women's health circumstances have not been undertaken. Maternal mortality and infant mortality statistics need to be collected and examined in relation to the level of rural infrastructural services present. Accessibility planning and mobility planning in respect of women's special health needs associated with their reproductive function needs to be undertaken: identification of the gender and household resource constraints, such as taboos and cultural customs, which prevent women accessing health facilities or place women in specific health danger in any particular location needs to be undertaken and a comprehensive data mapping of such patterns needs to be developed. As women have particular health needs examining the proportion of health budgets spent on childbirth and female related diseases will provide an early indicator as to whether women have been adequately included or participate in rural health services - gender responsive budget analysis can provide a very useful tool in this sector of rural activity.

Topic 4.Water access and management:

In contexts where pipeborne water is not present and indeed even where pipe borne wate is present but is not available through a domestic tap, women play a crucial role in collecting water and organising household water use. Historically, international agencies and government planners did not involve women in the designing, planning and determining the location of water facilities. At best, planners would identify local patterns of use of water and 'benignly' plan for those patterns: women's needs could be factored in this way but more typically they were not. There has been a major swing within the international agencies (following along the lines outlined by member-based NGOs such as SEWA)and in many water planning agencies and women have now begun to be represented on water user committees http://lnweb28.worldbank.org/oed/oeddoclib.nsf/DocUNIDViewForJavaSearch/06CAE6610D9F4C5585256B81007B1786/$file/215_Rural_Water.pdf. This movement towards women's presence on user committees and the involvement of user committees in the planning process is linked to the current policy perspective on the local development of social capital, however, there are still many locations where project plans call for the full participation of women on user committees but these goals remain unmet http://www.fao.org/FOCUS/E/Women/Water-e.htm.

Topic 5.Pipe borne services and electrification:

Gender and energy policy has developed as a specific concern in South Africa http://www.sustdev.org/journals/edition.04/download/ed4.pdfs/sdi4_53.pdf - a developing country which has also adopted a social inclusion policy approach in respect of gender. In the absence of physical infrastructure, such as pipeborne water and electrification the tasks performed by pipes and wires in the developed world are performed by women and girl children - they become the living infrastructure. They carry water and fuel to the home and take the excrement and rubbish away with a crossing of 'clean' and 'dirty' functions - cooking food on animal excrement or preparing food after disposing of garbage. Within a gender and energy framework, opportunities exist to consider the development of solar power technologies: historically developed countries with high quality electrification had little need to focus on the development of solar power and the south had few resources with which to develop solar designs for low income use, however, recent patterns of outage in the developed countries may open a design window in respect of standby solar systems which could be useful in developing countries. Approaches to rural service provision and to the development of alternative technologies appropriate for rural use have been largely ungendered in their analysis http://www.ifz.tu-graz.ac.at/sumacad/sa00_southwell.pdf: approaching the development of solar power technologies from a gendered perspective, accessibilities are greatly increased to a range of services including information exchange.

Topic 6.Secure accommodation:

The discussion of rural infrastructure services should encompass secure accommodation for women. Social traditions around marriage and widowhood often leave elderly rural women in inadequate accommodation (http://www.foundation.novartis.com/social_development/women_development.htm), a situation which intensifies the negative stereotyping of these women by communities (with the imposition of labels such as 'witch' in some contexts) and increases their social exclusion. Women's weak property rights clearly play their part in such social processes and the development of institutional support for those in crisis as well as the reform of property rights and rural customs around property rights is critical. Designing development projects so that older women are routinely built in as an active element of membership will enhance the security of accommodation of this very vulnerable social category. To give an indication of how gender and secure accommodation might feature as a key rural infrastructure service, the Grameen Bank has enabled the development of 448,031 rural homes across its life time through its loan activities to women rural dwellers.

Topic 7.Social security:

Rural access to social security is very limited as access to social security frequently relies on employment in the formal sector. This raises the issue of the need to develop alternative forms of social security http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lebanon/254/kasenta2.htm. The formation of credit unions and cooperatives clearly has a role to play in such circumstances.

Topic 8.Banking and credit:

The role of access to credit and banking facilities in reducing the social exclusion of women in rural areas is already evident. The success of the Self Employed Women's Association of Gujarat (SEWA http://www.sewa.org) and the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh (http://www.grameen.org) in organising women in rural areas into sustainable banking and credit social movements has received widespread acknowledgement. Access to credit and banking facilities creates a virtuous cycle in which women can increase their participation and control over other areas of decision making and resource allocation ( http://www.gdrc.org/icm/grieco.html). Developing banking and credit structures in contexts where women have weak property rights requires careful attention in the design of protocols and procedures for borrowing, lending and account keeping. The importance of member based organisations in which women are decision takers and decision makers and not just simply clients or customers is apparent.

Topic 9.Access to agricultural extension activities and resources:

The importance of building in gender access to extension activities and resources has gained recognition though changes in the practice of international institutions and governments still lag behind the winning of the conceptual battle. Women's lack of formal education has often disadvantaged them in being incorporated or included in extension activities, however, there is an increasing recognition that harnessing and building on informal educational opportunities and methods of approach can break the vicious spiral http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/V5406e/v5406e03.htm. It is important that women's lack of education is not used as a criteria by which they are barred from holding office or participating in decision making: the focus must be on providing training inside the participation fence http://www.usaid.gov/wid/pubs/it01.htm. In the context where female extension officers are in short supply, new information technologies can be used to amplify and further diffuse extension knowledge and such technologies also permit of interactivity between rural women and extension agencies - the Grameen field phone (http://www.apnic.net/mailing-lists/s-asia-it/archive/2000/03/msg00033.html) provides an example of such a development

Topic 10.Education

The importance of girls' education to the development agenda has now received widespread recognition. However, there are many rural contexts where the labour of girls is vital to household survival and this requires that educational provision be made in a different form to that provided in developed countries. Schools which operate outside of working hours, or school sessions which are harvest sensitive need consideration under rural infrastructure services. Equally important is the need to ensure the adoption of life long learning approaches which provide for adult literacy training http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/V5406e/v5406e03.htm. Ensuring that village school buildings are flexibly utilised to the benefit of whole communities and most particularly to the benefit of women is crucial. Water committees have become a favoured decision making form: local involvement in the operation of school buildings and education could have similar benefits.

Topic 11.Gender responsive budget analysis

Gender responsive budget analysis is a key tool in ensuring that women's participation in the new model of governance - participation management - is adequately resourced. Gender responsive budget analysis requires the routine collection of information by gender and the identification of gender differences in terms of the access to a range of resources http://www.unifem.undp.org/gender_budgets/

Topic 12.Access to information and communications technology:

Within the developed world, there has been a major discussion of the benefits that the new information communication technologies can bring rural areas - the death of distance - and of the danger of new information technology bypassing rural communities unless there is direct policy intervention. There is a recognition that new information communication technologies will strengthen urban bias unless effective intervention takes place. There is a growing and parallel discussion in the developing world and it is a discussion in which gender is a central theme http://www.unifem.undp.org/pap_itu.htm; http://www.undp.org/info21/text/bg/b-dary.html. The development of rural information technology infrastructure services in India (http://www.mssrf.org/informationvillage/assessment.htm ) provides a useful example of current policy trends. In a group of six villages in Pondicherry in South India, a

'project has established a hub-and-spoke model of data-cum-voice communication. The village centers can communicate with each other as well as to the Internet. A hybrid of technologies is used-wired with wireless for communication and solar with mains for power supply. The hub provides connectivity to the Internet through dial-up telephone lines, and the staff there creates locally useful content. The village centers receive queries from the local residents and transmit information, collected from the hub, back to them. An important feature of this project is the strong sense of ownership that the village communities have developed towards the village centers. The other key feature is the active participation of rural women in the management of the village center as well as in using it. A system of close consultation between the project staff and the rural users has been evolved, so that information needs are realistically assessed'.

Topic 13.Decision making and participation.

There is widespread recognition that development project, programs and policies should now be developed within a framework which involves the end users as participants and holders of civic rights rather than simply as client or customers. The focus is on participant management http://www.bestpractices.org/cgi-bin/bp98.cgi?cmd=detail&id=14702 and member based organisations as the best organising structures for rural infrastructure service development. There is concern expressed in the literature that such a movement to participant management should not be a mechanism for shifting costs and responsibilities onto the poorest and most vulnerable but that it should be a progressive step. Gender responsive budget analysis is an important instrument in ensuring that participant management is adequately resourced to meet gender equity goals; in addition, a gender audit of 'voice' is necessary to ensure that women are active decision makers and not simply passive members in participant management structures (http://www.geocities.com/transport_research/trbgen.htm).

Conclusion: the need for a well resourced, multi-dimensional, participant management approach.

The reduction of gender exclusion in respect of rural infrastructure access and provision requires adequate financing. Invoking participatory approaches and attempting to alter social bargaining and social capital structures in the absence of adequate resources for institutional change can result in a greater burden being placed upon women.

Local ownership of infrastructure requires that the resources for its maintenance be locally present or accessible to local institutions through the transfer in of resources from better resourced external institutions or agencies of government. In this respect, gender responsive budget analysis of the policies, programmes and projects of large institutional actors and agencies is critical. Extending participation of the socially excluded necessarily involves expanding the endowment from which they commence participation and bargaining and such expansions in endowment require greater routinisation if change is to be accomplished: gender responsive budgetary analysis provides a tool that can result in the more routine allocation of equitable resources in respect of gender and which marries with the vision of participant management and local ownership now alive in the policy literature.

Relevant Powerpoints on the web:

World Bank:

• http://www.worldbank.org/gender/transport/Grants___Pilots/SENEGAL_G_P/transport.ppt - World Bank Group Gender and Transport Senegal
• http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/strategies/events/cambodia/infra.pdf World Bank Infrastructure Services and Poverty Reduction - Cambodia

Key readings:

• Wasted time: the price of poor access http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/recon/eiip/publ/1998/ratp3 ILO - Geoff Edmonds
• Empowerment and the Institutional Basis of Antipoverty Policies and Interventions: The Case of Rural Infrastructure http://www.dse.de/ef/poverty/malmberg.htm Christina Malmberg Calvo and Louis Pouliquen: World Bank
• Speech strategies and gender exclusion in a rural development project: http://www.univie.ac.at/ecco/doc/hanak-031997-speech.pdf Tanzania - Irmi Hanak

Annotated bibliography:

• Hanak, Irmi (1997) Speech strategies and gender exclusion in a rural development project, Austrian Journal for Development Studies No 3/ 1997 pp257-281: http://www.univie.ac.at/ecco/doc/hanak-031997-speech.pdf
  This paper uses discourse analysis to examine gendered power relations in one Steering Committee meeting of a rural project in Tanzania. It demonstrates that simple presence is not sufficient to ensure that women have equity with men in decision making but that voice also requires auditing.
• Edmonds,Geoff Edmonds (1998) Wasted Time: The Price of Poor Access International Labour Organisation: Geneva http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/recon/eiip/publ/1998/ratp3/
  This document introduces, examples and argues that Accessibility Planning is a substantial addition to the planning 'tool-box' - especially at the local level. The process is simple, effective, easy to use and inexpensive. It has also been argued that the process addresses the real needs of the rural population as against the perceived demand....... certain additional benefits of the process have been suggested - in particular, the way it can link in to higher levels of planning and targeting in the infrastructure sector. The major issue, however, is that it provides a solid basis for local level planning of rural infrastructure based on actual need.
• World Bank (2001) Engendering development World Bank: Washington D.C. http://www.worldbank.org/gender/prr/engendersummary.pdf
  This report draws attention to the importance of the design of service delivery in facilitating equal access to the range of civic resources and functions necessary for full participation of both genders. In particular it draws attention to the design of school systems, health care systems, financial organisation and agricultural extension provisions.
• Kasente, Deborah (1997) Gender and social security systems in Africa IDRC: Ottawa http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lebanon/254/kasenta2.htm
  This paper provides a critical review of existing research on gender and social security in Africa and identifies key issues and outstanding questions for future research. This is done as part of a contribution to the Assessment of Social Policy Reform (ASPR) Programme Initiative of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), with the aim of identifying key elements of a framework for research on social security reform in Africa.
• UNIFEM (2001) Gender responsive budgets New York http://www.unifem.undp.org/gender_budgets/
  This concept note outlines the key dimensions of Gender Responsive Budget analysis. 'Gender budget analysis helps governments decide how policies need to be adjusted, and where resources need to be reallocated. Gender budget analysis provides women with an indicator of government commitment to address women's specific needs and rights to health care, education and employment. It also provides a way to hold governments accountable for its commitments to gender equality and women's human rights, such as Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), by linking these commitments to the distribution, use and generation of public resources. Gender responsive budget analysis promotes equality, transparency, efficiency and accountability.'
• DSE (1999) Inclusion, justice and poverty reduction - Villa Borsig Workshop Series http://www.dse.de/ef/poverty/contents.htm
  This web site contains a set of papers which discuss the concept of social inclusion in relation to justice and poverty reduction. It contains papers by academics, practitioners, representatives of member based organisations (including the Self Employed Women's Association of Gujarat) and international agency personnel. Many presentations are in the form of notes indicating the relative youth of this discussion within the field of development.
• Malmberg Calvo, Christina and Pouliquen, Louis (1999) Empowerment and the Institutional Basis of Antipoverty Policies and Interventions: The Case of Rural Infrastructure in DSE (1999) Inclusion, justice and poverty reduction - Villa Borsig Workshop Series http://www.dse.de/ef/poverty/malmberg.htm
  This paper draws attention to the need for an assessment of the role that rural infrastructure investment and the social organisation of rural infrastructure investment can play in the reduction of the social exclusion of women. '..it would be useful to compare the different facets of empowerment as it affects infrastructure interventions as opposed to other poverty related interventions such as food aid, social programs, or employment guarantee schemes. Issues such as how easy or difficult it is to achieve empowerment and how this is best done, and how much of a role empowerment plays in insuring proper targeting of poverty interventions and the achievement of desired objectives in each case, could be important considerations in choosing between various poverty alleviation approaches, and are therefore worth while investigating further. A better understanding of these issues will contribute to a firmer grasp on the societal transformation that has to take place to bring positive change in power structures and empowerment of the poor, women and other marginalized groups.
• International Labour Office (1996: last updated 1998) Social exclusion and anti-poverty strategies: research project on the patterns and causes of social exclusion and the design of policies to promote integration. International Labour Office: Geneva http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inst/papers/synth/socex/index.htm
  This document argues that 'The most important institutions for breaking social exclusion and extreme deprivation include: the basic markets of land, labour and credit through which people secure an income; the justice system - including systems of law enforcement; the education system, which not only builds human capital but also socializes individuals as citizens; the media; and, most fundamentally, the participatory and communicative structures, including new forms of social partnership through which a shared sense of the public good is created and debated.
• Asian Development Bank (2002) Bangladesh - Third Rural Infrastructure Project, 1997 http://www.adb.org/gender/practices/infrastructure/ban001.asp
  This document provides a review of the 'gender gaps' in the design of a major infrastructure project. The review states that: 'Infrastructure projects are sometimes thought to have few or no gender implications. This project shows how wrong we can be. The overall objectives of the Project are to accelerate economic and social development in the project area by improving, and subsequently maintaining basic rural infrastructure. Project components include development of the rural road network and associated bridges and culverts; improvement of growth center markets and boat landing facilities or ghats; construction of flash flood refuges and development of improved growth center markets and council (union parishad) complexes. Related income generation activities (e.g. road maintenance) are included.

  In the project area, poverty is widespread, and about 35 per cent of households are female headed. Women have been relatively inactive in income generating activities, and project design aims to promote their participation in project activities by providing them with selling areas in growth center markets.

  During a project review mission it was noted that important gender-related concerns had not been addressed during project design. For example, it was expected and assumed that men would undertake construction work. Yet, in reality many poor women were working on construction sites. Therefore it was important to encourage equal pay for equal work. In a society where segregation of the sexes is the norm, provision of separate toilets and waiting rooms in public buildings is essential. Design modifications of facilities were required to accommodate this cultural need in all aspects of infrastructure development, including market and council complexes, ghats and flood refuges.

  In the case of flood refuges, the potential needs of women were not considered. For example, the design of the building was one large room. In many instances, families remain in the flood refuge centers for weeks. During this period, the potential exists for pregnant women to give birth during their stay at the refuge. Accordingly, it was important to modify the building design to make provision for a small room for privacy and medical equipment.

  In the case of the new market centers, it was not sufficient to simply provide female selling areas. Women also needed training in shop and business management as sellers and buyers, and to be linked with Market Management Committees through representation on Vendor Associations.

  When undertaking income generating activities, whether it be in construction, maintenance, or market-related; women are often unfamiliar with banking services. They consequently needed assistance to open individual bank accounts, to have wage payments made through banks, and to establish compulsory savings. Group support was seen as an important factor here.

  To address these issues, a detailed Gender and Development-GAD-Action Plan was developed as mid-course corrections to address these concerns. The GAD Action Plan includes indicators to facilitate progress monitoring. These are included in the overall project implementation monitoring system. To set the plan in context, ADB through its Resident Mission conducted gender sensitization training for project officials, contractors, concerned NGOs, and various beneficiary/user groups. The Action Plan also included the recruitment of a GAD specialist to coordinate implementation of the Action Plan and the integration of gender in project-related budget allocation.'

• M.S.Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, India. Supported by International Development Research Center (IDRC), Canada (circa 2000) Pondicherry rural information technology infrastructure project: India (http://www.mssrf.org/informationvillage/assessment.htm
  Summary 'This project has established a hub-and-spoke model of data-cum-voice communication in a group of six villages in Pondicherry in South India. The village centers can communicate with each other as well as to the Internet. A hybrid of technologies is used-wired with wireless for communication and solar with mains for power supply. The hub provides connectivity to the Internet through dial-up telephone lines, and the staff there creates locally useful content. The village centers receive queries from the local residents and transmit information, collected from the hub, back to them. An important feature of this project is the strong sense of ownership that the village communities have developed towards the village centers. The other key feature is the active participation of rural women in the management of the village center as well as in using it. A system of close consultation between the project staff and the rural users has been evolved, so that information needs are realistically assessed. Quantitative data are collected on the use patterns, and stories of deriving benefit have been chronicled.'

  On the whole, the impact has been positive. There is significant policy interest in the project outcome.'

• UNIFEM (1998) Gender and telecommunications: an agenda for policy UNIFEM: New York http://www.unifem.undp.org/pap_itu.htm
  'In this policy paper, UNU/INTECH and UNIFEM would like to highlight the reasons why, in the absence of a focused policy, the benefits of telecommunications technologies may bypass women. This may happen even if developing countries get adequate access to relevant infrastructure and service delivery.The rate of change in telecommunications technologies has a different effect on women and men for a number of reasons. First, in developing countries, a large proportion of people live in rural areas, where women often constitute the majority. This is mainly because women, with their special responsibilities for children and the elderly, may find it less easy than men to migrate to towns and cities. The observed urban bias in telecommunications infrastructure tends to exclude non-elite women in most developing countries. In Vietnam, telephone connectivity is available almost exclusively in five major cities, although 80 per cent of the population live in villages. Kampala, the capital of Uganda, has 4 per cent of the nation's population but 60 per cent of the share of all telephone lines. The urban bias in connectivity thus deprives women, more than men, of their universal right to communicate.'
• Braga, Carlos Alberto Primo Braga (1998) Inclusion or exclusion? Information for Development Programme (infoDev), a multi-donor grant facility managed by the World Bank, Washington, D.C. on the UNESCO web site, UNESCO: Paris http://www.unesco.org/courier/1998_12/uk/dossier/txt21.htm
  This document argues that new information technologies aligned with appropriate developing country technology and communications policies offer the opportunity for development 'catch up'. 'These considerations point toward a more optimistic scenario for developing countries participation in the emerging knowledge economy. Although, no doubt, income and wealth inequality may increase in the initial stages of the process, catch-up can also happen at a much faster pace than in the past. ICT spending, for example, grew more quickly in most developing regions than in high-income economies in the 1992-97 period. And countries like South Africa and Brazil already boast a higher share of networked personal computers than most industrialized economies'
• Gillings (1999) Social funds and social exclusion: the Jamaican Social Investment Fund World Bank: Washington D.C. http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/LAC/LACInfoClient.nsf/d29684951174975c85256735007fef12/8e8a26f81bfe3edf852567fa007b755b/$FILE/Gillings.doc
  This document provides information on the Jamaican Social Investment Fund which has been operating within the conceptual framework of social inclusion/exclusion. ' The Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF), established in 1996 as part of a National Poverty Eradication Programme, has funded some 139 projects aimed at providing social and economic infrastructure, social services and organisational strengthening support to poor communities. This paper attempts to give a brief and tentative perspective on the role of social funds in relation to the problem of social exclusion, drawing on the experience of JSIF. The presentation first seeks to define social exclusion in relation to poverty and the role of the social fund. Next it considers the important dimensions of social exclusion in the context of the countries in which social funds operate and identifies excluded groups. The ways in which the JSIF has attempted to promote social inclusion are then described.'
• Maxwell, Simon and Percy, Robin Heber (circa 2001) New trends in development thinking and implications for agriculture Overseas Development Institue, London published on the FAO web site http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/X9808e/x9808e04.htmOverseas Development Institute:
  'The task in this paper was to say something about how context might affect future priorities for economic and policy research in food, agriculture and rural development (FARD). The issue was approached from two directions: first, by means of a brief review of how the sectors had evolved in the past and might change in the future; and, secondly, by reviewing recent debates on some aspects of development, in order to test the robustness of the current conventional wisdom on FARD. The first point is that the FARD sectors are changing fast. Contrary to the semi-subsistence peasant model which sub-consciously informs much thinking about FARD, and indeed about developing economies as a whole, it is hypothesized that in the near future agriculture will be largely commercial, most rural people will be disconnected from the land, and agriculture will be a relatively small sector in the national economy. Of course, this vision will apply more directly in some places than others. Nevertheless, it challenges FARD researchers: to project systematically, monitor effectively, and help planners deal with the inevitable transition pains. The paper then turns to thinking about FARD, and begins with a statement of the current conventional wisdom, derived from the World Food Summit, but also from the work of other international agencies working in the area. A rough-hewn consensus is identified, which manages an accommodation between poverty reduction, on the one hand, and market realities, on the other: growth is necessary (though not sufficient), the private sector is the main source of growth, the government's job is to stimulate growth and provide safety nets, participation is to be encouraged. Again, there are regional specificities to take into account, particularly when these general priorities are translated into detail.'
• Rukato, Hesphina (2001)Gender and energy in Southern Africa Sustainable Development International http://www.sustdev.org/journals/edition.04/download/ed4.pdfs/sdi4_53.pdf South Africa:
  This article records and analyses the increasing recognition of women's role in energy and environmental management in developing countries. It charts the progress which has been made in this area in Africa and gives information on current South African gender and energy initiatives.
• Jackson, Cecile (1999) Social exclusion and gender: swimming against the mainstream European Journal of Development Research 11 (1): 125-146
  'The concept of social exclusion has been widely adopted by development agencies, and in development studies, notably since the Social Summit, as another way of understanding and reducing poverty in the south. Some analysts see social exclusion as a cause of poverty, others suggest that it is both an expression, and a determinant, of poverty, and most would probably agree that poverty is a form of social exclusion.

  Although originally defined in terms of the rupture of social bonds, and applied to social disintegration rather than poverty per se, social exclusion has developed in a range of paradigmatic styles in different political and intellectual contexts, and is currently central to reconceptualising disadvantage in a context of European economic and social transformation.

  In development discourses social exclusion is predominantly discussed in terms of its relationship to poverty - is it a cause or consequence of poverty? is it a better way of conceptualising poverty? how does it differ from other poverty paradigms?.

  Here my interest is rather on how satisfactory the social exclusion model is for understanding the ways in which gender patterns the experience of deprivation in developing countries. In the paper I first contextualise this discussion with a brief account of how feminists have analysed marginality and integration in the south, in a tradition which has paralleled but not crossed into European social exclusion discourses. I then deal with some questions about how the social exclusion framework is conceptualised; implicit dualisms and issues of plurality, conceptions of actors and processes of exclusion and claims to conceptualise agency. The critique is appropriately tentative since the social exclusion field is still developing, and usage is both broad and flexible, but I reflect here on some core characteristics of exclusion concepts. Finally I argue, with reference to land based and labour based exclusions, it is necessary for social exclusion to start thinking with a concept of gendered subjects rather than an implicitly ungendered universal person.'

Website links:

Gender guidelines on service delivery:

http://www.ausaid.gov.au/publications/pdf/gender_guidelines_water.pdf - Gender guide lines (Australian Aid): water supply and sanitation

http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/recon/eiip/asist/sectoral.htm Sectoral programmes (ASIST, ILO)- overview of rural infrastructure issues

http://www.undp.org.np/pub/gender/refguide/gendr-ch02.htm Gender guidelines for project cycle management - UNDP

Gender policy tools:

http://www.unifem.undp.org/gender_budgets/Gender responsive budget analysis - UNIFEM

http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/cida_ind.nsf/8949395286e4d3a58525641300568be1/7b5da002feaec07c8525695d0074a824?OpenDocument Gender responsive indicators -CIDA

Best practices:

http://www.apnic.net/mailing-lists/s-asia-it/archive/2000/03/msg00033.html Grameen field phone - an evaluation.

http://www.unescobkk.org/education/appeal/clc/pdf/effective/MALAYSIA.pdf Rural vision movement of Malaysia

http://www.unesco.org/most/africa1.htmGauteng Community Information Initiative - South Africa

http://www.bestpractices.org/cgi-bin/bp98.cgi?cmd=detail&id=14702Brazil - decentralised decisionmaking and participant management

http://www.bestpractices.org/cgi-bin/bp98.cgi?cmd=detail&id=9826 Nepal - Women's Empowerment Program - village banking and literacy

http://www.worldbank.org/gender/projects_programs/opera/41150s.htmVillage infrastructure project- World Bank, Ghana

http://www.dse.de/ef/poverty/bhatt.htmNotes on poverty reduction from the organiser of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), Gujarat

http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSServlet?pcont=details&eid=000094946_00 121301483084 Toolkit on gender in water and sanitation- World Bank

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/cv/wedc/papers/23/grouph/lakule.pdf Water and sanitation - gender perspective. Tanzania

The contemporary context of rural gender exclusion

http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lebanon/254/kasenta2.htmGender and social security systems in Africa

http://www.usaid.gov/wid/pubs/it01.htm Gender and information technology - USAID

http://wbln1018.worldbank.org/sar/sa.nsf/a22044d0c4877a3e852567de0052e0fa/f5ce686a0160234f8525687b0062dd8e?OpenDocument Water and work for India's poorest region

http://www.fao.org/FOCUS/E/Women/Water-e.htm Women and water

http://www.iadb.org/exr/doc98/apr/ec1373e.pdf Social investment loan to Ecuador - Note: uses language of social inclusion but weak on gender

http://www.uncdf.org/projects/eval/vie95c01-midterm.html Village infrastructure projects Vietnam- participatory planning and under-representation of women

http://www.ausaid.gov.au/keyaid/infra.cfmInfrastructure and poverty reduction - AUSAID

http://www.ids.ac.uk/cgap/poverty/target/geographic.htmlMicrofinance and geographic targetting

http://www.gdrc.org/icm/grieco.htmlMeeting the moment: Microfinance and the social exclusion agenda.

Conceptual literature:

http://www.adb.org/documents/books/social_exclusion/Social_exclusion.pdf Social Exclusion: Concept, Application, and Scrutiny, Amartya Sen (PDF)

http://www.dse.de/ef/poverty/contents.htmVilla Borsig Workshop Series 1999 Inclusion, Justice, and Poverty Reduction - DSE

http://www.mluri.sari.ac.uk/rdi/Scotland - Rural Data Infrastructure Project - Macaulay Institute

http://www.reeusda.gov/fra/fundrfa.htmRural Information Infrastructure Program - USA

http://www.cpa.ie/news/html/n45957544,25,5,1999.htmlIreland, social inclusion and rural services in context of european structural funds

http://www.istoselides.gr/world/print.php?sid=89 Greek document on social exclusion and operation of structural funds

Resource persons, agencies and institutions:

Transport, social inclusion and road user charging - gender, ethnicity and life cycle issuesFiona Raje, Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford

Courses and training programs

Social exclusion and social security in the developing world, ISS, the Netherlands http://www.iss.nl/pdfs/D2002_4.pdf

Prepared by Margaret Grieco, Professor of Transport and Society, Napier University, Edinburgh EH10 5BR