Heritage, Development and Equality: a proposal of indicators to measure the contribution to gender equality in international projects of cooperation for development based on architectural heritage interventions

Abstract

The international cooperation for development has been working during decades to reduce the inequalities between the persons and the peoples of the world. Within these inequalities those who take place between women and men have to be placed in the first position, provided that women concentrate the 70 % of the world poverty, a fact which we name a feminizing of the poverty. The architectural heritage possesses an important potential as generator of development in the communities where it is located at. This is why the interventions in this heritage must be used in the projects of international cooperation to reduce the inequalities and then to promote the gender equality. But in many cases a great difficulty exists in showing how an intervention in the heritage promotes the development and how it can help to reduce the inequalities between women and men. This brings sometimes to question the convenience of the rehabilitation of heritage facing other one type of projects (education, health, infrastructures.). With the purpose of being able to demonstrate that an intervention in the architectural heritage is capable of generating development and therefore to reduce the inequalities between women and men it is necessary to establish a series of indicators that are capable of measuring the results of these projects of cooperation. In this paper a series of indicators that allows evaluating how the rehabilitation and management of the architectural heritage promotes the gender equality.