As it is for many, reckoning with my own racial, sexual, and religious identity and its impact on my life outcomes is a constant negotiation. Our collective understanding of how and when different identities come together and converge is an exercise that has become an important policy instrument, able to meaningfully foster inclusion, diversity and equity across organization and society. Beyond personal and collective reflection, achieving equity requires systemic change at all levels. My experience of navigating various organizations and communities has shown me that our work toward achieving equity begins with the deliberate choice to challenge old patterns and drive better results. A year ago, I embarked on a unique opportunity with Impact Canada as a Challenge Prize Fellow tasked with designing a new challenge with Agriculture and Agrifood Canada (AAFC).

The government of Canada has adopted iterations of the Gender Based Analysis Plus tool to support the development of responsive and inclusive policies, programs, and other initiatives since 1995. GBA Plus is not advocacy, but a process for understanding who an issue affects and tailoring proposed initiatives to meet the diverse needs of the people most impacted, mitigating any barriers which may prevent access to the proposed initiative. Importantly, the “plus” in GBA Plus refers to intersectionality and looks beyond sex and gender to consider other diverse identity factors.

The goal of this piece is not to redefine GBA Plus; the Government of Canada already offers excellent resources and guidance for anyone with different starting points. In this piece, I share my experience of adopting a deliberate equity lens to design a $12 million Agricultural methane Reduction Challenge as a Challenge Prize Fellow. I make the case for why adopting an equity framework in government funding and programming is not just a moral imperative but also an essential ingredient for innovation. My exploration of GBA plus and its rapid application was facilitated by the Impact Canada Challenge methodology which focuses government funding on the achievement of outcomes and enables new ways of working.

Where do we begin?

In my experience, having previously worked on addressing systemic inequities in the education and humanitarian sector, equity considerations come too late in the process, or they appear as an add-on to a program that has already been designed.

Contrary to traditional funding and programming, challenges come with a tried and tested methodology for development which creates the conditions for undertaking equity building research and implementation. Significant time, resources, and reflection are baked into each stage of the challenge design, starting with the Understand phase. In the Agricultural Methane Reduction Challenge, this is where I spent the most time to not only understand the problem of methane emissions, but how systemic and historical inequities, as well as ongoing barriers to entry into the sector, have resulted in the under-representation of certain groups such as black, indigenous, people of color, and young producers at the innovation table. When my team and I began the Understand phase and conducted rounds of in-depth interviews, a key accountability question we asked ourselves was “who is missing” from our conversations or research sample. By applying reflexivity to our own process and the blind spots within it, we began to pay attention to the complex social, cultural, and economic conditions in which cattle, producers, and methane emissions interact.

Where do we go with this data?

Gathering disaggregated data is an important starting point and conducting a data audit of the sector became the critical first step to developing our own contextualized understanding of inequity in the cattle sector. Through continuous inquiry and ‘why’ questions, we realized the dearth of demographic and disaggregated data. The data that we did mine and analyze revealed that of all producers roughly 1.9% are Indigenous farm operators, 2.9% are visible minorities, and 8.6% are youth (40 and under). This investigation into disaggregated data not only revealed the gaps in our datasets but prompted us to develop better data infrastructures within the challenge to collect and prompt this type of data collection. The effort took the shape of developing specific questionnaires that would be embedded in application forms, jury recruitment forms, and plugged into the evaluation framework. We cannot effectively improve outcomes for all if we do not have reliable data to understand some groups.

How do we bring it all together?

A key task during the development of the challenge was to develop an integrated GBA plus framework that sits within the wider challenge process to ensure the lessons we were learning were systematically used to inform our challenge prize. To get there, we found success in the following approach to arrive at a framework we could adapt for our challenge and serve as a roadmap for future work:

1. Designing a challenge-specific GBA plus framework based on stakeholder engagement within the federal government and externally.
2. Delegating tasks for this at the individual and team level to ensure collective ownership in the design and implementation.
3. Aligning GBA plus actions to each challenge design and implementation milestone to ensure seamless application (i.e., equity outcomes linked to application guides, jury selection etc.).
4. Iterating and seeking feedback on a regular basis from all stakeholders to create room for reflection and learn from work already undertaken within the department and GoC.

Drawing on the principle that equity requires sustained commitment, collaboration was prioritized to set the distinct goals for the GBA plus framework. The work is far too important and far too urgent for any one team to do alone.

How do we know we are making progress?

Challenge prizes are results-based and outcomes-driven funding models where accountability, transparency, and inclusivity are upheld in the low-barrier, jury-led assessment model. By applying a similar approach to building equity within the challenge, we developed targets for each stage of the challenge design and implementation, holding ourselves accountable and ensuring we were on track to deliver results. As a result, our tailored and integrated GBA plus framework for the methane reduction challenge includes measurable outcomes such as:

• Development of a GBA plus toolkit with resources and links for various stakeholders internal and external to the federal government that will be involved in the challenge to build literacy and shared understanding.
• Redefining innovation for the challenge to include solutions that target and uplift equity deserving groups within the sector and linking it to assessment criterion.
• Employing plain and simple language in the application form to make the process accessible and inclusive.
• Collecting standardized demographic data throughout the challenge.
• Recruiting a diverse jury of experts with at least 50% Gender parity (women and/or non-binary people) and significant representation (30%) of members of other equity-deserving groups, including those who identify as Indigenous, Racialized, Black, and/or People of colour (“Visible Minorities”), People with disabilities (including invisible and episodic disabilities), 2SLGBTQ+ and/or gender and sexually diverse individuals.

A reality check.

Despite our best efforts as public servants, systemic inequities and barriers to inclusion prevail and even the best laid plans cannot overcome them fully. Without being paralyzed by this reality, I have found power in acknowledging the limitations of our work, continuously educating myself, hearing from equity deserving groups, and proactively applying an equity orientation to every piece of work both at work and outside. While it is still a work in progress, by trying new avenues and centering equity, I have emerged from the first year of my fellowship with greater capacity to apply GBA plus and, as a result, as a better equipped public servant.