Harvard Gender Analysis Framework

The Harvard Framework describes who does what and who controls what, in the service of more efficient, gender-aware project design (a Women in Development logic). The Moser Framework, developed a few years later, goes further by classifying gender needs as practical or strategic and by treating planning as a political act aimed at transforming unequal relations (a Gender and Development logic). Harvard maps roles; Moser asks whether interventions challenge the structures behind them.

Because they are often held by different people. A woman may have access to land, credit, or a tool — she can use it — yet have no control over it, meaning she cannot decide how it is used, sold, or whose income it generates. Many projects fail to benefit women precisely because they expand access without shifting control. Forcing analysts to fill in both columns surfaces this gap before a project is designed.

Yes, as a starting tool. Its matrices remain an efficient way to gather sex-disaggregated field data and to make women's labour visible, and practitioners frequently use it as a first step before applying more relational frameworks such as Moser or the Social Relations Approach. The caution is not to stop at description: the framework should inform, not replace, an analysis of power and the strategic interests at stake.