Statement of Phillipines, October, 2015

In 2010, the Philippine Government adopted our national action plan on women and peace and security, becoming the first country in Asia to do so. Initiated by civil society and peace and women’s rights organizations, the Philippine national action plan rests on four pillars. There are two targeted outputs, briefly identified as protection and prevention, and empowerment and participation; and two cross-cutting support processes, namely, promotion and mainstreaming, and monitoring and evaluation.

The story of the Philippine national action plan may be best told through the metaphor of weaving, more specifically, mat-weaving, which is common to most Asian countries. Just as weaving is not learned overnight, but goes back generations, the Philippine national

action plan benefits from decades of consciousness- raising and organizing on the part of women, peace and human rights advocates. The Philippine national action plan condenses time. But, like a good mat, in which all the fibre strands are pulled tightly together, it also condenses space. Building on civil society’s energies, wisdom and experience, it wagers on the Government and its instrumentalities — in a word, the bureaucracy — to be the bearers of gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Today, the Philippine national action plan has been anchored and provided a legal basis by Philippine law, led by the Magna Carta of women and recent legislation that has adopted human rights and international humanitarian standards. We also have an earlier law that requires all Government agencies and local Government units to allocate at least 5 per cent of their budgets to a dedicated gender and development fund, thereby ensuring the availability of funds for immediate start-up and mobilization needs.

It has not been left to one agency to implement the national action plan, but rather strands of the Government bureaucracy are woven in with the establishment of a national steering committee, initially composed of the heads of nine Government agencies, to which eight additional agencies were added. They are involved in implementing the Government’s PAMANA programme, which provides development and good governance interventions in conflict-affected areas. Altogether, PAMANA operates in over half of our provinces.

From the beginning, we did not want the national action plan to end up as just another document that might be good to read and display on the bookshelf, but is neither implemented nor practiced. In the same way that mats have a history of long, hard and sometimes rough use in Philippine households, we intend for the national action plan to be a felt presence, making a difference in women’s lives.

The implementation of the Philippine national action plan is a painstaking process, because we want to cover all of the bases, including policy, planning, implementation and monitoring mechanisms, as well as budget considerations. Modest initial results are being reported. Among the outcomes already being gleaned are the increased presence of women in peace negotiations and the implementation of peace accords, the establishment of women-friendly spaces that provide the necessary measure of private and safe space for internally displaced women and girls in evacuation centres, the adoption of explicit gender-equality policies and mechanisms as an integral part of the governance of the armed forces of the Philippines, culture-sensitive trauma-healing programmes for Muslim women, the inclusion of women and peace and security issues in the training programmes for foreign-service officers, and the plan to establish a dedicated team of public prosecutors for cases of sexual- and gender-based violence in conflict-affected areas. Additionally, local Government units in those areas have been given the means to issue

their local versions of the national action plan, which complements major funding support from their own resources. And, just two weeks ago, we launched the first Government executive course on women and peace and security, in partnership with a leading national university.