SANKALP’S strategy has been to bring about advancement, development and empowerment of women and girls. The Organisation has been putting strategic emphasis on the more dynamic Gender in Development (GID) strategy, in contrast to the narrower Women in Development (WID) approach.
While, the WID focuses only on women and targets them through either women-specific projects or women's components in the programmes, the GID approach emphasizes on a wider viewpoint to include women’s rights and women’s role as active participants and beneficiaries in the development process. There is a greater realization at the international level about the need for a refocusing and shift from welfare-oriented approach of WID that treats women as passive recipients of development to the broader gender-focused approach of GID that attempts to engender development, empower women, and perceive women as active agents in their own rights. WID is concerned with women per se. GID, on the other hand, underlines the role of both women and men in the developmental process. GID seeks the equal participation of women and men in development, emphasizes gender relations, focuses on the reduction of gender disparities, addresses the interrelationship between gender roles as well as recognizes equal access of both women and men to resources and power.
Strategies
SANKALP has been adopting innovative strategies and programmes to create an enabling environment for achieving gender equality and the advancement of women. The Organisation’s activities are guided by the Beijing Platform for Action, resulting from the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW and the Millennium Development Goals for 2015.
The Organisations’s strategic priorities broadly replicate and adapt the seven interdependent priorities, identified by the Task Force on Education and Gender Equality. UN Millennium Project 2005. These priorities which are the minimum necessary to empower women and change the historical legacy of female disadvantage; include;
- strengthening opportunities for post-primary education for girls while simultaneously meeting commitments to universal primary education;
- guaranteeing sexual and reproductive health and rights;
- investing in infrastructure to reduce women’s and girls’ time burdens;
- securing women’s and girls’ property and inheritance rights;
- eliminating gender inequality in employment by decreasing women’s reliance on informal employment, closing gender gaps in earnings and reducing occupational segregation;
- increasing women’s share of seats in national parliaments and local governmental bodies; and
- combating violence against girls and women.