The toolkit is a practical compendium for coastal and fisheries management practitioners seeking to understand how gender can affect coastal ecosystems resource use and management and coastal resilience. It helps practitioners develop baseline knowledge around gender dimensions related to coastal and natural resources use, livelihoods development and ecosystems management. This knowledge can help identify gender gaps and advance gender-integrated and gender responsive planning for improved resilience of coastal ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.
The toolkit provides direction around key instruments, concepts and themes for qualitative gender analysis in coastal ecosystem-dependent communities. A set of illustrative questions to guide the practical stage of data collection is also provided in the last section. These questions are by no means exhaustive and are designed as examples to explore information about gender roles and power relations under five domains: i) access and control to assets for livelihoods; ii) gender roles, responsibilities, time and lived experiences; iii) participation and decision-making; iv) cultural norms, beliefs and perceptions; and v) laws, regulations, and institutional practices and mechanisms. Power cuts across domains of changing gendered relationships, livelihoods, policies and practices, environment and resources. Power is also observed in the processes that regulate gender and ethnic identities at community level through various instruments and institutions which may be religious, policy-related, and development-related. The toolkit also concerns norms regarding how women are able to control their own lives and the decisions and actions they can take.