This article was originally written by Sandy Blackburn for OnImpact. We are republishing it here with permission because its reflections on applying a gender lens strongly align with AIIW’s work and our belief that considering gender can lead to more informed, equitable and impactful investment decisions. The original article can be read on OnImpact here.

Applying a gender lens to a project helps us understand how impact is created for women, by women and through women. That distinction can change the design of a project, the risks it holds and how impactful it ultimately is, and it matters all the more because women are disproportionately affected by disadvantage.

In the years before COVID, Social Outcomes worked with the DFAT funded Pacific RISE initiative in Papua New Guinea to examine how impact investment could benefit small scale fresh produce and cocoa farmers in East New Britain, the majority of whom are women.

We began by running focus groups with women farmers and asked what would need to change for them to build a more stable income as small scale farmers. They told us about the roads. The feeder roads they relied on were routinely ignored, and if maintained, it would not only help them as farmers but also remove problems they faced getting their children to school and accessing health care. This wasn’t the answer we were expecting to hear, but as they described the appalling quality of these dirt roads that they rely on, it became abundantly clear as to why it was their priority.

When we put the same question to infrastructure experts, of whether women and men use roads differently, they had never considered it. The women farmers already knew the answer, and could explain exactly how the state of those roads failed to meet their needs.

Women use different roads, at different times of day, at different usage levels, for different purposes, in different ways than men. In East New Britain, that means women walking small feeder roads multiple times a day, between home and their plots, the clinic, the school, the market stall, a neighbour’s house. Those roads are the responsibility of impoverished local councils and are rarely maintained, often being virtually destroyed by severe weather. Women told us about giving birth alone by the side of the road on the way to hospital, because ambulances could not get down feeder roads in that state of disrepair.

Women in the focus groups described to us how they were limited as to what they could grow by how much they could carry to market along these perilous dirt roads. They either carried produce on their heads or pushed wheel barrows for hours to access a main road where they could hail down a van to take them the rest of the way. They told us about how difficult it was to attract teachers to the schools their children attended as they would also have to walk long distances to get to and from school each day.

The roads that attract large infrastructure investment are almost always major highways, which small scale women farmers rarely use. Exporters, other businesses and men commuting to jobs in major centres rely on the highway network. Women are more often self-employed or working in the informal sector and use it far less, but that is not the same as being economically inactive. Women do 70% of the agricultural work across PNG, and in cocoa and coffee work two to three times more hours than men, work that is critical to productivity and quality. Women also manage household gardens and take produce to market, often providing the most stable income source in rural households. That produce moves along feeder roads, not highways.

Private transport does operate in East New Britain, but it rarely reaches these feeder roads. Where it does, the fares are high, because the roads are in such poor condition that maintenance costs cannot be recovered from what operators can charge.

Grade and maintain those feeder roads as part of an infrastructure investment and the private people movers would return to service them. Women farmers told us, unanimously, that the extra sales from moving larger volumes of produce to market would easily cover that fare. They were equally clear that the roads only need to be gravel, with inexpensive six-monthly regrading after the wet season. That is the specification, set by the people who will use it every day.

This is where the impact case sharpens. Sealing a highway is expensive, and the impact for small scale farmers is often marginal relative to that cost, yet highways are what donor and development finance routinely fund. The same capital, redirected to feeder roads, would upgrade a far greater stretch of network and create far greater impact for the rural economy that actually depends on it, with a financial return that follows rather than leads.

There is significant donor grant funding going into women in agriculture, and significant private and public capital going into infrastructure. Blending those two pools, rather than running them in parallel, is where the opportunity for real impact sits.

Highway investment builds the formal economy. If the goal is an economy that works for more than the businesses and international partners already inside it, the starting point has to change. A gender lens does not add cost to that analysis. It corrects a blind spot in it, and in doing so, it changes what impact actually looks like, and where the capital should follow.

Social Outcomes designed a development impact bond that could fund the work and test the economic, educational and health outcomes that would likely accrue. The Cocoa board were key partners in that design and were willing to contribute to the maintenance of the roads if the volume of cocoa that could enter the market increased. The project remains with DFAT and is yet to be implemented. The insight does not expire while it waits. The roads, and the women who depend on them, are still there.

Sandy Blackburn is Founder and CEO of Impact Culture Australia and Managing Director of Social Outcomes, a specialist impact consultancy. Impact Culture Australia exists to help organisations move from articulating, measuring and reporting on impact to embedding it.