Most proposals now carry a GESI paragraph. Far fewer carry GESI design — and donors have learned the difference.
Checkbox GESI counts heads: “40% of participants will be women.” Outcome GESI changes what the project is: activities scheduled around care work, venues chosen for accessibility, information in the languages minorities actually speak, budgets that fund the accommodations inclusion requires, and indicators that measure benefit, not attendance.
Four design moves that separate the two
Run the inclusion analysis before logframe lock (who is excluded here, by what barrier?); apply the twin-track approach — mainstream inclusion across all activities and fund targeted actions for the most excluded; budget for inclusion explicitly (sign language interpretation and transport stipends are line items, not miracles); and disaggregate every indicator by sex, age and disability, then actually review the splits.
The Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) course builds this design capability end-to-end, with Disability Mainstreaming in Projects and Organizations going deeper on the largest and most overlooked exclusion, and Protection, Gender and Inclusion for humanitarian teams. All run classroom and live online.