Count the women in the room. Count the women who completed training. Count the women who received the transfer. This is gender-sensitive programming — and in many Somalia-based programmes, it is where gender analysis begins and ends.

It is also, on its own, insufficient.

Himma Consultancy has evaluated and supported women's empowerment programming across Somalia since 2016 — most extensively through the UN Women Transformative Leadership for Women's Rights programme, which reached 255 women across 17 networks in all Federal Member States. What that work has taught us is that the distance between gender-sensitive programming and genuinely gender-transformative programming is significant — and consequential.

What Gender-Sensitive Programming Does

Gender-sensitive programming acknowledges that women and men have different needs and constraints. It ensures women can access services, participate in activities, and are counted in data. This is necessary. But it does not, by itself, change the power relations that produce gender inequality in the first place.

A women's savings group that operates within a household structure where women have no control over how savings are used is gender-sensitive. It includes women. It does not transform their economic position.

What Gender-Transformative Programming Does Differently

It Works on Norms, Not Just Access

Gender-transformative programming explicitly addresses the social norms, institutional practices, and power structures that constrain women's agency. This means working with men and boys as well as women. It means engaging community and religious leaders. It means designing interventions that create new social expectations — not just new skills.

We trained 255 women in transformative leadership, conflict analysis, and negotiation. The most significant outcome we observed was not in the women's knowledge scores — it was in how they described their interactions with community decision-making structures six months after training.

It Measures Empowerment, Not Just Participation

Gender-transformative MEL systems track whether women's decision-making authority has increased — not just whether women attended. This requires more sophisticated measurement: Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), agency scales, or qualitative tracking of decision-making patterns over time.

It Designs for Sustainability

Training that ends when the project ends rarely transforms anything. Gender-transformative programming builds structures — networks, coalitions, peer support systems — that continue to generate change after the project cycle closes.

The Somalia Context

In Somalia, gender-transformative programming must be contextually grounded. Approaches imported wholesale from other regions often underestimate clan dynamics, the role of religious authority, and the genuine security constraints that shape women's mobility and voice. The most effective programmes we have evaluated combine international frameworks with deep local knowledge — engaging community gatekeepers, working through existing women's networks, and building on indigenous concepts of women's leadership rather than imposing external ones.

Conclusion

Counting women is the beginning of gender programming, not the end of it. Programmes that want to produce genuine, lasting change in women's lives need to engage with the systems that constrain them — and design for transformation, not just inclusion.