The United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) needs to do better at ensuring women and marginalized groups are benefitting from the economic development programs it supports in Africa, according to an aid watchdog.  The Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which evaluates Britain’s aid spending, gave evidence before members of parliament on Wednesday about the overall credibility of DFID’s work to reduce poverty through economic transformation and job creation in Africa.

The ambitious strategy made strong commitments to ensuring programs deliver inclusive growth and promised to “place the economic empowerment of girls and women at the heart of our approach and help marginalized groups.”

The ICAI report revealed that none of the programs reviewed contained specific measures to target women and girls, although three-quarters highlighted women and girls as target beneficiaries. Furthermore, the analysis found “no examples of monitoring tools designed to assess whether programmes were inadvertently benefiting one group at the expense of others,” the report states.

“Many of the programs under review had useful language around addressing women on an abstract level … [but this was] not necessarily being carried through into specific interventions that would benefit women,” Marcus Cox, a lead evaluator for ICAI, told the IDC.

“Gender is still a gap,” he said, and while program plans included “simple disaggregated data” about gender, they lacked the “really detailed analytics to see whether the benefits were being shared” among women and marginalized groups, Cox said.

Speaking during the session, Rachel Turner, director of economic development at DFID, said that a number of improvements had and were being made, so much so that ICAI commissioners will find “a very different situation” when they do their one-year review.

Read the full article about DFID's economic development strategy by Sophie Edwards at Devex.