5.3 WID, WAD and GAD Approaches

Quick notes — start here

• WID: include women in development.
• WAD: recognise existing work and unequal economic structures.
• GAD: examine and change gender relations.
• Access to a resource is not the same as control over it.
• Practical benefits and structural reform can reinforce each other.
• Formal definition: WID seeks women's inclusion in development; WAD examines women's existing contribution within unequal development structures; GAD examines gender relations, institutions and control over resources.

Simple example: A poultry project gives women training and birds: inclusion. It examines traders' prices and dependence on buyers: political economy. It asks who owns the birds, who keeps income and whether care duties permit expansion: gender relations. These questions show why beneficiary numbers alone cannot demonstrate empowerment.

Remember this sentence: WID asks whether women are included; GAD asks whether the relationships governing their lives have changed.

Check yourself: A woman receives a loan: what further evidence would establish increased agency?

Detailed bullet notes and references

Plain-English explanation: WID makes neglected participants visible. WAD challenges the idea that women were simply outside the economy. GAD asks how roles, care and bargaining power shape outcomes. Their intellectual histories overlap; policies often combine elements.

Critical point: Immediate practical benefits and structural change are both valuable. Water supply can meet an immediate need while freeing time and enabling participation; the same intervention may have both practical and strategic effects depending on design.

Memory cue: INCLUDE → EXAMINE THE SYSTEM → CHANGE RELATIONS. This is a study aid, not a scholarly framework.

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Examiner's lens: present WID → WAD → GAD as an argument, not a list — each approach exists because the previous one was criticised. This is the single most-tested concept in the chapter.

The chain

• WID — Women in Development (early 1970s)
  • Liberal-feminist / modernization-influenced. Origin: Ester Boserup, Woman's Role in Economic Development (1970); US Percy Amendment (1973) required attention to women in US aid; UN Decade for Women (1976–85).
  • Assumption: women were left out and should be integrated into existing development (income-generation, credit) without questioning the model.
  • Critique: treated women in isolation from men / social structure; adds women to an unchanged system; ignores gender relations; increases women's workload.
• WAD — Women and Development (mid/late 1970s–80s)
  • Marxist / dependency roots.
  • Assumption: women were already integrated (through unpaid / underpaid labour) but on exploitative terms — the problem is the nature of integration. Benería and Sen (1981) critiqued Boserup.
  • Critique: still treated "women" as a homogeneous class; did not examine gender relations or patriarchy inside the household.
• GAD — Gender and Development (mid-1980s–present)
  • Socialist-feminist and constructionist roots (Chapter 2).
  • Shifts focus from "women" to gender relations — how development affects and is shaped by the socially constructed relationship between men and women; calls for transforming unequal structures, not just adding women.
  • DAWN network (1984; Gita Sen and Caren Grown, 1987): a Southern feminist alternative.
  • Caroline Moser, Gender Planning and Development (1993): the triple role (reproductive, productive, community managing).
  • Maxine Molyneux (1985): practical vs strategic gender needs.
  • Planning tools: Harvard Analytical Framework (1985), Longwe's Empowerment Framework.
  • Tool: gender mainstreaming (endorsed at Beijing 1995).
  • Critique: harder to operationalise; requires deep institutional change; often reduced to "add gender indicators" (tick-box).

Comparison chart

Empowerment and capability links

• Amartya Sen: "missing women" (1990); capability approach (Development as Freedom, 1999).
• Naila Kabeer: empowerment = resources + agency + achievements.
• UNDP indices: Gender Development Index (GDI) and Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) introduced in the 1995 Human Development Report; the Gender Inequality Index (GII) replaced GEM in 2010.

Simple versions

• WID: include women in development projects.
• WAD: examine women's place within unequal development processes.
• GAD: transform gender relations, institutions and resource control.

Example to develop

• Women's access to agricultural credit: explain the institutional mechanism (land title, collateral, mobility) and link it to the approach.

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🧪 Worked example — a microcredit scheme in three lenses

• WID: give women small loans so they can earn income (integrate women).
• WAD: recognise that women already work hard in unpaid or underpaid roles; check whether the scheme merely increases exploitation (e.g., home-based piece-rate work).
• GAD: ask who controls the loan and income inside the household (gender relations); pair credit with legal literacy, property rights and shared responsibility.
• Result: GAD asks the questions WID and WAD skip.

📝 Extra notes

• Moser's triple role (1993): reproductive (care), productive (income), community managing (unpaid public work). Example: a woman cooks and cares, stitches for income, and organises neighbourhood water access.
• Practical vs strategic needs (Molyneux, 1985): practical = immediate conditions (water, food, clinics); strategic = changing subordination (land title, legal rights, decision power).
• Tools: Harvard Analytical Framework (1985), Longwe's Empowerment Framework, gender mainstreaming (Beijing 1995).

20-mark examiner's answer map — 5.3

• Introduction: WID, WAD and GAD differ in whether they target exclusion, structural inequality or power relations among genders.
  • Explain point 1: WID: increase women's participation in jobs, training and loans, with limits if underlying relations remain intact.
  • Explain point 2: WAD: highlight women's existing contributions and unequal global political economy.
  • Explain point 3: GAD: examine institutions, paid and unpaid care, property and decision-making.
  • Explain point 4: Contrast practical needs with strategic interests using a worked village development project.
• Pakistan application: A women's agriculture loan can be paired with childcare, property documentation and participatory resource decisions.
• Critical comparison: The approaches overlap in practice; do not simply label one 'best' without explaining conditions.
• Past-paper matches: 2016 Q8; 2017 Q8(b); 2018 Q8(a); 2021 Q7; 2025 Q7. Find the question-specific answer in 5A.PYQ — WID/WAD/GAD, globalisation, theory & colonial history (2016–2020) or 5B.PYQ — Modernisation, SAPs, coloniality, WID & global systems (2021–2026).
• Conclusion rule: answer whether the theory explains the identified mechanism, not merely whether women feature in the project.

✅ How to score

• Present as a chain: problem → solution → critique for each, then note that each approach was born from criticism of the previous one.
• Add one Pakistan application (BISP cash transfers; Lady Health Workers; girls' stipends).

⚠️ Common mistakes

• Listing the three without critiques.
• Saying GAD has no limitation (it is hard to operationalise; "tick-box" risk).

❓ Active recall

• Explain WID, WAD and GAD with the microcredit example.
• Give one practical and one strategic gender need for a rural woman.

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Gender mainstreaming — definition, implementation and case study

• Definition: systematically assessing how all planned policies, laws, programmes and budgets may affect people of different genders, and incorporating the findings throughout design, implementation and evaluation. It is not a one-off 'women's project'.
• Background: the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) promoted mainstreaming; ECOSOC (1997) articulated a widely used UN definition. Link the practice to GAD, which examines gender relations rather than simply adding women as beneficiaries.
• Five implementation stages
  1. Diagnose: collect relevant sex-disaggregated and qualitative data; examine differences by age, disability, income and location.
  2. Design: consult affected groups and set concrete, measurable inclusion objectives.
  3. Budget: allocate funds for the measures, not merely a gender-related label (see Chapter 7.2 on gender-responsive budgeting).
  4. Implement: assign responsibility, train staff and remove practical barriers.
  5. Monitor and evaluate: track who uses the service, outcomes, complaints and unintended effects; revise the policy.
• Worked example — a district public-transport scheme in Pakistan
  • Problem: planners add routes without checking whether women and men have different travel patterns, care responsibilities or safety concerns.
  • Analysis: review route coverage, late-evening access, waiting areas, affordability, accessibility and harassment complaints.
  • Response: consult riders, adjust route and stop design, improve lighting and complaint mechanisms, train transport personnel.
  • Evaluation: compare ridership, reported safety, journey time and access to schools/clinics before and after, with relevant disaggregation.
• Mainstreaming vs targeted action: mainstreaming embeds a gender perspective in the entire scheme; targeted measures (e.g., a specific safe-travel intervention) may complement it. Both can be used together (dual-track approach).
• Mainstreaming vs gender-responsive budgeting: mainstreaming covers the whole policy cycle; gender-responsive budgeting specifically analyses and changes how financial resources are allocated and spent.
• Limitations: weak data, token consultation, insufficient budget, lack of accountability and 'tick-box' reporting.
• CSS answer line: real gender mainstreaming changes decisions, spending and measured outcomes; merely mentioning gender in a policy does not suffice.
• Active recall: define it; name five stages; distinguish it from WID and gender-responsive budgeting; give a Pakistan case study.

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Exam-ready answer — WID, WAD and GAD Approaches

Women in Development, Women and Development, and Gender and Development offer different ways of understanding inequality in development. Their central difference concerns whether the main problem is exclusion, unequal economic structures or gendered power relations.

Inclusion, structures and relations

WID draws attention to women's exclusion from services, employment and development programmes. It supports measures such as training and access to credit. Its limitation is that adding women to an existing project may leave the rules governing work and resources unchanged.

WAD challenges the assumption that women were outside development. Women already contributed through paid and unpaid work, but often within unequal economic relationships. This approach highlights exploitation and the wider organisation of production.

GAD examines relations among people and institutions. It asks who owns assets, makes decisions and provides unpaid care. Its focus is not simply the number of female beneficiaries but whether the distribution of power changes.

Practical application and judgement

In a farming project, training can improve access while leaving land ownership and control of sales income unchanged. A gender-relations approach would examine those arrangements as well as household workloads. Nevertheless, immediate benefits should not be dismissed: meeting practical needs can create conditions for greater agency. Effective programmes connect inclusion with changes in the structures that limit its value.

Example and application

A poultry project gives women training and birds: inclusion. It examines traders' prices and dependence on buyers: political economy. It asks who owns the birds, who keeps income and whether care duties permit expansion: gender relations. These questions show why beneficiary numbers alone cannot demonstrate empowerment.

Conclusion

WID asks whether women are included; GAD asks whether the relationships governing their lives have changed.