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Gender Marker

Gender Expertise

CARE's Gender Marker helps the organization to deliver on our commitments to gender equality.

CARE’s Gender Marker leads the sector as a self-assessment scoring tool to track how well our projects are creating change for women and girls. It enables us to learn about our progress and identify areas where we can improve. This Gender Marker is widely acknowledged as one of the most comprehensive out there in terms of scale and scope.

The tool monitors how well gender has been integrated into humanitarian and development work throughout a project cycle. CARE staff reflect on how a project contributes to increasing gender equality and use the outcome to calculate how they scored along the CARE Gender Continuum from gender unaware to gender transformative.

The Gender Marker scoring bar, ranking programs on a scale from

CARE’s commitment to accountability and learning means we don’t just use our Gender Marker once. Every single project team reviews their gender marker score each year as part of CARE’s annual project reporting process.

We then then use this information to identify opportunities for learning and improvement, at the project level and across all our programming worldwide.

CARE’s Gender Marker in Action

Every year, CARE Ethiopia’s leadership team examine how all their projects have scored on the Gender Marker and use this data to identify strengths and areas of improvement. This is helping ensure their projects create real change for women in the communities where we work – in 2022, 60% of their projects scored as gender responsive or transformative.

Key resources

Gender Marker Vetting Form

This is the form used to score projects against the criteria of the Gender Marker. The Vetting Form is available in a range of languages.

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Gender Marker Guidance

Gender Marker Guidance

This guidance (available in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic) is designed to support CARE teams' use of the Gender Marker for learning and improved programming. It includes guiding questions and practical tips for each step.

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Gender Marker Mini-guide: Analysis

This more detailed guidance (available in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic) supports project teams to identify whether their project is meeting the gender analysis criteria of the Gender Marker.

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Gender Marker Mini-guide: Activities

This more detailed guidance (available in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic) supports project teams to identify whether their project is meeting the activities criteria of the Gender Marker.

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Gender Marker Mini-guide: Participation

This more detailed guidance (available in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic) supports project teams to identify whether their project is meeting the participation criteria of the Gender Marker.

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Gender Marker Mini-guide: MEAL

This more detailed guidance (available in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic) supports project teams to identify whether their project is meeting the MEAL criteria of the Gender Marker.

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Gender Marker Advocacy Tip Sheet

This tip sheet, with examples, provides guidance for interpreting the Gender Marker questions for programs which primarily focus on advocacy.

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Gender Marker Adolescent Tip Sheet

This tip sheet (available in English, French, and Spanish), with examples, provides more detailed guidance for staff working on adolescent-inclusive projects and adolescent-specific projects on how to answer the Gender Marker questions.

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Further information and resources

Gender Marker Case Studies and Lessons Learned

This learning document captures the outcomes of the initial one-year rollout process of the CARE Gender Marker.

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Gender Marker Case study: Souquona

This case study offers one example of gender transformative programming in livelihoods and value chains work. Read alongside the Gender Marker Vetting Form to see how the project’s approaches correspond with each section of the Gender Marker.

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Gender Marker Case study: Win Win

This case study offers one example of gender transformative programming in livelihoods and value chains work. Read alongside the Gender Marker Vetting Form to see how the project's approaches correspond with each section of the Gender Marker.

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