Every proposal now asks how your project addresses gender — and the two terms doing the heavy lifting are often used interchangeably. They should not be.
Gender analysis is the diagnosis
It examines how roles, resources, power and needs differ between women, men, girls and boys in your specific context: who owns the land, who controls the income, who attends the meeting, who carries the risk. Tools like the Harvard Analytical Framework and Moser’s triple-roles lens turn “we consulted women” into evidence a programme can act on.
Gender mainstreaming is the treatment
It takes that diagnosis and threads it through everything — objectives, activities, budgets, indicators, staffing — so gender outcomes are engineered rather than hoped for. A mainstreamed project does not add a “women’s component”; it redesigns the components it already has.
Where to start
Analysis first, always. Mainstreaming without analysis produces the checkbox projects donors have learned to spot. Our five-day Gender Analysis course builds the diagnostic craft; Gender Mainstreaming turns findings into programme design; and teams formalizing the whole approach take Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) to anchor it institutionally. All three run classroom and live online — the full track is in our Gender & Protection category.