In Africa, gender mainstreaming is being taken into account in the areas of; education, remuneration, representation, employment, opinion and family. The whole society, including governments and other organizations are taking up the responsibility of reducing gender-based discrimination (Hafner & Pollack, 2002).
In case of Ethiopia the vision of gender mainstreaming policies is clear, but there are weaknesses in staff capacities, resource allocations and institutional systems. Despite efforts put in place by the government, implementation of policies continues to be a challenge at community levels. Various factors have contributed to these shortcoming keys among them being poor governance and lack of the effective monitoring and evaluation frameworks which are integral in implementation program. Although political will exists, the commitment is inadequate, which makes the implementation of the different legislations and anti-discrimination laws difficult (Ibrahim, 2009).
According to Hareg (2005) the structure of the national gender machinery was planned to reach the grassroots and implement the various provisions in the Ethiopian Women’s Policy, its effectiveness has not been impressive for a variety of reasons. These include: Placement of the structures in a position where they cannot be part of decision making, Limitations in financial and human resources, Lack of clarity in the mandates of the women’s affairs structures, Decentralization, which has made accountability between federal WADs and regional WABs challenging, Absence of strong networking and collaboration with sector bureaus, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations (CSOs), and communities.
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According to the gap stated by Esther M (2010) the main challenges of gender mainstreaming process include lack of political goodwill from the government, the slow pace of developing gender policies by various ministries, lack of sensitization of staff on gender related issues, lack of adequate budget and technical staff and lack of proper training on gender related issues. The study also shows that socio-cultural factors are barriers that hinder the gender mainstreaming process. Factors like patriarchy, gender stereotyping, socialization and lack of societal awareness on issues pertaining to gender have been seen as the major barriers of gender mainstreaming. Others include the literacy disparities between men and women and the belief by many people that gender mainstreaming is all about women. However, issue of challenge of gender mainstreaming (Esther, 2010) and issue of gender mainstreaming development (Ibrahim, 2009) were more discuss. However, they did not concern about problem and challenges of gender mainstreaming. Therefore, this study will focus on assessing the problem and challenges of gender mainstreaming implementation. Particularly in the study area is still considered the research gap to conduct left by other mention studies.
