Dr. Kristie Drucza , CEO of Includovate
Kristie Drucza (Ph.D) is the founder and CEO of Includovate, a global, multi-disciplinary, social enterprise dedicated to empowering women, marginalized communities, and other excluded groups. She is a community developer, gender and inclusion adviser as well as a researcher. She holds a PhD degree in Political Anthropology on social inclusion and social protection. She has also a Master’s degree in Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development specializing in gender.
She has a passion for building partnerships and the capacity for systems change that leads to social inclusion gender, human rights/child rights and particularly within a developing country context.
Her organization Includovate is one of the partnering organizations in the Earstern Africa’s project “Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women ( GrOW ) – East Africa” that seeks transformative change to advance gender equality in the world of work, with a focus on gender segregation, unpaid care, and women’s collective agency. Science Africa Ethiopia Correspondent MEKONNEN TESHOME TOLLERA approached Dr. Kristie Drucza for an exclusive interview. Excerpts:
______________________________________________________________________________
Could you please give us a general introduction of yourself and your company – Includovate?
My name is Kristie Drucza. I have a Ph.D. in social inclusion and social protection. As [part of my professional career, I am running international development projects in various countries, usually related to gender, disability, youth, women empowerment, migration and on any one excluded from development spheres. I lived in Ethiopia for a four and half year and was working for CIMMYT, in the ILRI campus in Addis Ababa. My work there was doing feasibility studies and evaluating or some type of assessment related to applied researches to help inform development practice on wheat and maize research projects for Ethiopia, Pakistan and Afghanistan
So, in doing this work in Ethiopia, I came to realize that there are a lot of fly-in and fly-out of international researchers telling Ethiopians what to do. Without involving Ethiopians, journals and research papers have been published in enclosed-access and if people in the county want to download these resources, they need to pay in dollars and this is very neocolonial. So, I thought we needed this knowledge process to change.
By doing a lot of meta-analysis of big national data sets, I also realized that people with disabilities tend to be missed out especially those ones in the agricultural sector.
Moreover, despite available statistics show those female herd households in Ethiopia are 26.1%, the surveys that I was analyzing show that only 10% female-headed households were cited in agricultural related projects. These were randomly sampled surveys. So I realized something was going wrong in terms of inclusion and reaching those who are most marginalized.
I mainly do I qualitative researches and I also know that Focus Group Discussion (FGD) should also be employed meticulously and carefully.
Includovate was born to train researchers and build their capacities in low-income countries as well as to give them exposure to and get them to collaborate with other researchers, to learn new writing skills, new analytical techniques, That is what Includivate does and we are registered both in Australia and in Ethiopia.
What are the activities your organization currently doing here in Ethiopia particularly in relation with the GroW Project?
Our project focuses on women’s economic empowerment and unpaid care. So, what we’re trying to understand is the attitudes of policymakers, the gaps in policy in terms of commitments, law making, contradictions in some policies.
We have done very in-depth systematic literature reviews to understand facts and realities. We are doing surveys on the knowledge, attitude and practice of some key government departments and identify the training needs to help fill some of those capacity gaps. We also study some of the knowledge gaps. It seems that it is a new approach.
The role of unpaid care contributing to economic growth is not counted in national accounts, the fact that it’s unpaid, it’s predominantly seen as women’s role.
Then what happens when the women do join the workforce, which means there’s no safe childcare or when a woman moved from rural areas to the city areas, it’s very hard for them to be able to afford to work. So there’s a lot of disincentives for women to be economically empowered and we see that the unpaid care burden. Some people do not like calling it a burden.
The literature does not tell us that, because actually and it appears that some women are very happy to stay at home as moms doing that work. So it’s not a burden to everybody but some women feel that it’s a burden. They would rather be in paid works or they would rather have their spouse help them.
They want to have been involved equitably and the women very well know that if their husbands are not around, there’s no food and their children will drop out of school and in the absence of men women are also obliged do their house works while also going to do paid works or their children will do paid work. So, understanding these dynamics and having policy makers also understand that is a key part of this project. Then we can try and create policy solutions that work, that fill the gaps.
Now we have set up a help desk to engage policy makers and to help them get responses for their questions and interact with us. We understand policymakers are busy. There always being asked to write briefs, turn up to meetings and there’s very little thinking time. They’re so busy.
So this help desk, they can help them get information on women’s economic empowerment or unpaid care, and we can respond to their question through it.
So in many ways, we can be like a library, and we can provide technical support to government departments that are interested in this topic and want to develop evidence-based solutions.
What are the target beneficiaries of the project?
We are still trying to actually understand the most strategic entry point because we can have some impact somewhere first. For example, it may be around childcare availability for working women in Addis Ababa, which is a small target group or we can go for something broader or we can target all women in Ethiopia.
Focusing on having men recognize unpaid care and have it counted or having it redistributed. We are still at this stage of trying to fine-tune the most appetite for this change with policymakers, because all of it can be beneficial. I mean, something big like having equal paternity leave to maternity leave. That could be one change that would have failed change that would affect all men and women of childbearing age and the message that it would send across the country is that the role of looking after children.
What can you say about the achievements so far made in running the project?
So the biggest achievement probably is the creation of the Help Desk. It’s like I said, policymakers and other interested organizations can ask questions and we will give them evidence-based answers at the help desk. Based upon the literature, based upon statistics, there are blogs that we have written and literature reviews to consolidate what we know so far.
We have also started interviewing government policymakers and other organizations. There used to be a bit of a coalition, a group of organizations that would meet to discuss this but presently it’s inactive.
So we are trying to reactivate it and give it some clearer terms of reference and a purpose in meeting so that we can create more knowledge and awareness from what we’re learning.
Again, it’s all about being evidence-based. So what is the evidence telling us? Not what we feel, but really what is needed, and about what do we know and don’t we know.
Tell us about the challenges that you have faced so far.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, look, some of the challenges involve getting access to government departments. I have worked for my government before and there’s many approvals that are needed in order to be able to interviewed and assess civil servants. I understand that and that is taking time.
We’ve also faced some challenges in the staffing because, the project only allows a certain percentage of the budget to go towards personnel and that means part-time people, and it can be hard to find people who want to work part-time. That is the other key challenge that we faced.
It’s a very short project, really, 18 months, but it’s highly ambitious. So the challenge is that a lot of this kind of needs to be front loaded, so we need to be able to have things on the health desk for people who want to use it and getting those things at evidence-based takes time. So that’s the other challenge, it’s just the duration of the project and some of the budget restrictions of the project and as well, and access to government.
What differences that you are aiming to bring about in this project?
One of the things that we want to change is is making policies coherent. I mentioned that there are these international conventions the government has committed to and signed, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, such as the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities and a range of various other ILO workers’ rights conventions and the like.
But then if you go down, you might see there are some things in the gender action plan, but then they’re not in policy, in the Ministry of Agriculture’s policy, the issues are not mentioned or they’re not also mentioned in information communication technology policies.
We see rather a watering down of these commitments, and so what we really want to achieve is having that coherent. We have a few target Ministries that we think play a really important role based upon the literature review on women’s economic empowerment and paid care that we’re trying to influence to just maintain the existing commitments and to help policymakers understand where that might be. Unpaid care, predominantly seen as women’s role is not counted in national accounts.
The proclamation on working hours, for example, and does not talk about flexibility, then that’s something that we would help policy makers to understand.
Can’t you tackle these challenges in forging collaboration with similar civic local organizations?
Oh, yes, absolutely. We are doing that. We have three organizations in our consortium. One of them is Addis Powerhouse, which is a young feminist advocacy network. They do a lot of work on LinkedIn and online, they also do some face-to-face groups, and they are our partner.
The other partner we have is WISE, a very longstanding NGO that helps women with economic empowerment and does various trainings for people who are new to the workforce, on gender and financial inclusion.
So we’re working all together and in addition to that, the coalition I mentioned for women’s economic empowerment, we have a range of other organizations such as NEWA. We need to formalize how often we meet and what the purpose is and who has information to share and sort of getting a bit of structure around that in terms of learning from each other. So that’s what we’re doing.
So if you have anything to add, let me give you the opportunity.
Do I have anything to add right now? No, I think it is a work in progress. I think it is an exciting program and highly ambitious. We’re really motivated to do a great job here. And I’m glad I had the chance to talk to you.