Barbados Bureau of gender Affairs - Transformation or Name Change?

It was in August this year that the Barbados Minister of Social Transformation announced his commitment to the establishment of the Bureau of Gender Affairs to replace the existing Bureau of Women’s Affairs.

The idea for the change comes out of the governing party’s 1999 manifesto which states: “the new Bureau will change the traditional single focus of the Women’s Bureau to wider gender issues to ensure that problems facing certain sections of the male population are systematically resolved.”

However, serious concerns have been expressed on the renaming of the Bureau and the public consultations held on the issue.

In a paper submitted to the Ministry of Social Transformation, Dr Eudine Barriteau, Director, Centre for Gender and Development Studies, says while the Centre welcomes the name change and the relocation to the Social Transformation Ministry, these are insufficient actions to ensure optimal performance.

“The Ministry should conduct several internal assessments and program audits to determine whether the original Bureau has not satisfied its terms of reference.

“The Bureau had been criticized in the past for not living up to the government’s and public’s expectations. The criticisms were usually made without examining whether the Bureau was ever designed to function in more than an advisory capacity for the minister responsible for women’s affairs.

“Since its inception in 1976 (as a division of community development), the Bureau has never been part of the welfare system, the training institutions of government, nor established with any strong research capacity.”

According to the paper, the original mandate of the Bureau has never been formally adopted. By 1987, the Bureau had been located in five different Ministries had seven Ministers and was relocated three times.

A 1987 review of the Bureau prepared by the ILO Sub-Regional Office noted that structural problems experienced by the Bureau include lack of clarity about its function; inadequate resources; inadequate lobbying support; and inability to develop/maintain monitoring mechanisms to forge appropriate linkages with key sectors. It therefore recommended that the Bureau be upgraded to a Department/Division with all relevant structures in place.

In the transformation exercise envisioned for the Bureau, the Gender Studies Centre is recommending that the Minister should identify the new issues in Barbadian society that did not exist 23 years ago when the Bureau was established. The problems women (and men) experienced then, continue to exist and are now complicated by new social and economic challenges.

There is need for members of the Bureau and the Ministry to be exposed to workshops in gender sensitization and methods of gender analysis, to understand how the social relations of gender operate on Barbadian and Caribbean society and the implications of these for society’s development and well-being.