Women Agree New Areas for Action

November 14, 2005 - (IPS): Experts have agreed new areas for "aid architecture" to promote gender equality and women's rights. Five steps -- political space, participation, a secure knowledge base, accountability, and the simplification of key issues -- are essential so women's rights are not lost in growing development cooperation, experts agreed at a United Nations Development Fund for Women (Unifem) conference here last week.

"The stakes for women are high. We have made important gains in the last decade in terms of linking human development with human rights and human security, but as we keep seeing all too clearly, these gains can be lost and advances reversed," Unifem executive director Noeleen Heyzer told delegates at the close of the conference on 'Owning Development: Promoting Gender Equality in New Modalities and Partnerships'.

"To make a real dent in removing gender inequalities and reducing poverty, things cannot be done on the cheap. The new development architecture now taking shape represents an historic opportunity to invest in strategies that actually work. We need to recognise this and commit the resources needed to apply them broadly, especially in the world's poorest countries," she added.

Some 130 gender equality experts from developed and developing countries, and representatives from government and donor bodies gathered in Brussels for the three-day meeting jointly hosted by Unifem and the European Commission, the European Union (EU) executive. In recent years, there has been considerable reshaping of the structures and financing of development cooperation.

Aid allocation is increasingly driven by partnerships between donor and recipient countries, and ownership by the recipients of aid. Unifem says such shifts in development have raised important questions about aid implementation and the accountability of development actors, while presenting new opportunities to advance gender equality and the poverty eradication agenda.

But Unifem warns that to date gender equality has not been addressed explicitly, and that such opportunities could be lost unless "serious efforts" are undertaken. The five measures agreed are necessary to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), delegates said. They insist that a "greater knowledge base with technical expertise" and an "increased political leverage of supporters of gender equality" are essential to effectively engage with the new aid modalities.

"It has emerged that you want to ensure independent access to funding for civil society organisations, build men's and boys' knowledge of and support for gender equality and women's rights and build linkages between gender advocates in the North and the South to strengthen their political leverage," Mirjam van Reisen, director of the Europe External Policy Advisors (EEPA), a Brussels-based centre of expertise on the EU's external policies, told delegates Friday.

Experts concluded that it is important to ensure that gender equality is "integrated in the policy instruments rolled out in the implementation of the Paris declaration on aid effectiveness" and to situate this declaration "in the context of globalisation, trade negotiations and other processes that have an impact on gender relations and on the nature of national ownership."

Delegates said increased accountability and the simplification of gender issues should also play a key role in the advancement of women's rights."We should monitor accountability with gender-sensitive indicators and clarify the accountability roles of different actors," said van Reisen. "Development communication must inform citizens in concrete terms of the benefits they may expect from development policy, the resources earmarked for particular services, and the means by which they may demand redress for non-delivery."

Unifem says it will work to maintain a network to provide space for mutual exchanges and support. "We can build on this meeting to make sure that friendships remain and benefit each other. We want to provide a forum where we can link North and South policy cocktails, and we have to bring all of our agendas together," Heyzer told IPS. "We need to make sure that whatever we say gets rooted at the ground level where change needs to happen," she added.

Reading a closing statement drawn up by delegates, Patricia Espinosa, president of the National Institute of Women in Mexico, reiterated the importance of ensuring that the new aid architecture and the implementation of the Paris declaration reinforce international instruments and declaration on women's human rights. "National ownership and accountability can only be achieved if women's voices and concerns are central to processes of development assistance. Therefore, women's machinery at national and regional levels and women's civil society organisations should be fully involved at the level of development planning, and must have access to resource allocation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation," she said.

Delegates also demanded that Unifem's position within the UN system is strengthened "with increased resources, status and visibility to facilitate further progress on gender equality in all our countries." Lieve Fransen, head of the human and social development unit in the European Commission's development directorate general said the European Commission had learnt some important points from the conference. "What I understood from the meeting is that we really need to do more work, and the work has to be very specific. Europe, first of all, should do much more to put gender equality and women high on the political agenda," she told IPS.

"Europe needs to play a leadership role in that because the UN agencies are not political agencies. The EU statement on gender equality and women's power is quite strong and we have strengthened it in view of this meeting. I can see much clearer for myself what I have to do," she said. Fransen says there also needs to be increased action on the ground, rather than political statements.
"It is a question of life and death. Women are being raped and getting HIV. They have no way of protecting themselves against that happening. There are things that we can do now. We don't need more research, we have money to do it now," she said.

"A lot of women also need to do more to use the political space in their own countries. In a way I find it strange that they think they need to keep on lobbying donors, when they need to lobby their own governments and create their own political space in their own countries to make changes happen," she added.

From http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31000