WOMEN AS ACTORS? An analysis of the focus on women´s representation within Swedish development cooperation

Abstract: Gender inequality is still a wide spread problem in the world today. One way of working for gender equality is via development cooperation. Nowadays gender equality advocacy is an accepted and important part of development cooperation and to target women is a common policy. According to several strands of research on women´s representation in political science, women´s inclusion as decision making actors matters for policy outcomes that address women's interests. Is this something acknowledged by development cooperation? In this thesis, I explore this by looking at the case of Sweden´s development cooperation. Sweden is a country with a history as active in gender equality policy both domestically and internationally. As such an exemplary case, one would therefore expect Sweden to be sensitive to this in policy strategy concerning development cooperation. The method used is qualitative content analysis and the materials analyzed are policy documents. The result is that there are several signs in the documents of that Sweden has adopted an aim for women´s representation under the notion of women as actors within development cooperation. The documents also gave examples of implementation in projects but further research could focus on how well the aim is implemented.