Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Project design

Background

Ageing as an issue of growing importance for international policymakers and decision takers. By 2050, the world will have almost 400 million people who are 80 years or older, making it the first time in history that the majority of middle-aged adults will have living parents.

Projections suggest that Sub-Saharan Africa specifically will see a rise from 32 million older people (60+) in 2008 to 212 million in 2050.

Increased prosperity leads to longer life expectancy, living longer brings challenges if there is no planning and support for long-term care, and no focus on the rights and needs of older citizens.

Objectives

1) Produce a policy discussion paper that inspires a gendered lifecourse perspective in HelpAge International’s work through a stronger understanding and analysis of the intersections between gender and ageing across its programme and policy work.

2) HelpAge International integrates the above perspective into its Theory of Change, programme delivery, advocacy, campaigning, strengthening voice, knowledge and evidence streams.

3) HelpAge International is able to evidence and learn from its gender mainstreaming efforts leading to greater gender sensitivity in programming and to gender transformative change for older women and men, to inform programme development and policy influencing across all offices and its network.

Methods

This discussion paper is a product of collaboration between the University of Warwick and HelpAge International. It builds on research undertaken by Professor Ann Stewart, Warwick Law School, and supported by Dr Jennifer Lander, Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester (formerly Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick Law School) in 2016-17. This project also built on Professor Stewart’s Caring for older women in Kenya project, funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

HelpAge International and the University of Warwick funded the development of the paper, with support from the EU, Irish Aid, the Economic and Research Council ESRC (grant reference ES/M500434/1). The researchers consulted with a wide range of key stakeholders with interests in gender and ageing, including staff members and network partners of HelpAge International.

Regional workshops were held in Jordan, London and Nairobi to develop the ideas and consult with key informants and drew on the knowledge of key informants in India, Tanzania and South East Asia. A global advisory group consisting of key informants, including a range of development policy advisors, provided guidance in its development.

Outcomes and Impact

The policy document made recommendations in relation to HelpAge International’s key areas of work. The document was discussed in workshops (including in London (UK), Amman (Jordon) and Nairobi (Kenya)) and regional webinars.

Income and poverty

1) Address the structural causes of income insecurity in older age by creating opportunities for older men and women to participate in just and favourable income-generating activities, as well as universal access to social pension schemes.

2) Ensure that women can own and inherit land and property and can use these assets to access credit across all stages of the life course. Address ways of increasing ownership for women across the life course and address the gender implications of changing land use and ownership on older women.

3) Ensure just and favourable conditions of decent work for older people, removing unequal pay and addressing discrimination against women in with through bodies that address labour rights and protections (both in the formal and informal sectors). Care and social reproduction.

4) Address the unequal distribution of caring responsibilities occurring across the life course through measures that encourage more equitable distribution within the family and community.

5) Address the limitations that ongoing and new caring responsibilities place on older women in securing an income through productive work, in conjunction with tackling discriminatory practices which nudge or force older woman out of employment. In particular, the limited ability of many older women to accumulate assets associated with productive work (i.e. property, savings, and entitlement to pensions) must be integrated into social policy and advocacy strategies.

6) Recognise and mitigate the lack of social capital men may have accumulated over the life course, potentially impacting their chances of being cared for by their families.

7) Design more sensitive research methods, such as through time-use surveys and other methods, to ascertain how care responsibilities are distributed. Health and wellbeing

8) Use a gender transformative approach to address the whole life course in order to ensure maximum functional ability, independence and wellbeing, irrespective of health status, in older age.

9) Recognise and resource the vital role that environments play in supporting healthy ageing.

10) Advocate for gender supportive environments which remain important in older age to complement gender-sensitive programme delivery on health and care for older women and men.

11) Invest in health data collection and analysis that is disaggregated by age and sex.

Violence, Abuse and Neglect (VAN)

12) Commission more action research to pilot new interventions and services on VAN, particularly on how negative social attitudes towards older age (ageism) produce violence and how these interact with other harmful processes and norms that sustain GBV and gender-based discrimination, driving specific types of violence.

13) Campaign for the UN Sustainable Development Goals reporting process to include women and men over 49, and for the extension of age brackets in global violence surveys, in humanitarian data collection tools and analysis, as well as for stand-alone surveys on VAN of older women and men.

14) Advocate for both national and local levels to establish norms, policies and laws which seek to create a social environment that is conducive to non-violent relationships, including a formal mechanism for developing and implementing national plans of action. Humanitarian Action

15) Commission research to underpin gender-sensitive humanitarian programming and gender-transformative planning and advocacy.

16) Listen to and amplify the voices of older men and women in humanitarian contexts.

17) Recognise gender differentiated vulnerabilities for men and women to inform humanitarian programming.

Collaboration and Next Steps

This project resulted in further collaboration between the University of Warwick and HelpAge International through the Gender and ageing in African contexts: policy, legal and institutional development: Co-designing a project to support a life course policy approach to gender and ageing in African contexts project.