Speech
Development Effectiveness: Gender Equality at the Core of Aid Effectiveness
By Ms. Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Director, UNIFEM
Date: 20 May 2007
Occasion: Gender Equality and Development Planning and Budgeting in the Commonwealth of Independent States: Towards Ghana 2008 – High-level Regional Consultation, Almaty, Kazakhstan, 20 May 2007.
[Check against delivery.]
I want to extend a warm welcome to our distinguished partners and colleagues who have joined us for this consultation. In particular I want to acknowledge Kazakhstan President Mr. Nursultan Nazarbayev, under whose patronage the meeting is being held, and our partners in the National Commission on Family and Gender Policy, without whom this dialogue would not be possible. Special thanks to Ms. Aitkul Samakova, Advisor to the President and Chair of the National Commission, for her valuable role in the realization of this meeting.
We are here at a critical moment for gender equality and women's empowerment. At the 2005 World Summit, Member States affirmed the centrality of gender equality and human rights to development, peace and security, and that the full implementation of the goals and objectives of the Beijing Platform for Action and Beijing+5 is an essential contribution to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In addition, they recognized the link between the need for improved implementation and development assistance, committing to increase official development assistance (ODA) by US$50 billion in real terms between 2004 and 2010 and to double aid to Africa over the same period.
Anticipating this increase, in January 2005, developing and developed countries agreed in the Paris Declaration that achieving the MDGs depends not only on increased ODA but also on a significant increase in aid effectiveness. Women in particular looked forward to the boost this increase would give to efforts to implement commitments to gender equality and women's empowerment made in the Beijing Platform, especially in developing countries.
However, 18 months later, ODA has not increased. In fact, in 2006, the total actually fell, down 5.1 percent from its peak in 2005. Eliminating debt relief, which spiked in 2005 with debt cancellation in Nigeria and Iraq, the drop is only 1.8 percent. Overall, however, eliminating debt relief from ODA totals shows a very modest increase over the last five years, including 2005, highlighting the fact that other forms of aid will have to increase very substantially if there is to be any realistic hope of reaching the US$130 billion target by 2010, as OECD has stated quite clearly: they point out that to fulfil their pledges, donors will have to triple the present rate of increase in core development assistance over the next four years. Given the importance of ODA for financing development and gender equality, the need to fulfil these commitments is critical. This is especially true if aid focused on gender equality is at last increasing, as initial figures indicate, and if this increase turns out to be substantial.
The goal of these consultations is therefore twofold: first, strengthening capacity and partnerships to ensure that gender equality is integrated into national development planning, and second, mobilizing constituencies to ensure that donors keep their part of the development bargain, and meet the 2010 target. Underlying both of these is a further objective: ensuring that the UN continues to uphold a development agenda based on the norms and standards that underpin its mandate, including human development, human rights and human security. The aid effectiveness agenda provides an opportunity to focus on how to link to the new aid modalities within the framework of its development effectiveness mandate, based on the work of all of its agencies, including UNIFEM. It is only through a clear articulation of this mandate that cross-cutting issues of gender equality, human rights and environmental sustainability will find strong expression in the new aid environment. This is true not only for regions where aid is falling but also for the CIS region, where it has been increasing steadily since the 1990s.
All of these objectives are essential in order to move the gender equality agenda forward from the normative progress we have made, including the signing of agreements and the passage of laws, to implementation and progress for women on the ground. Currently, 185 countries have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and at least 120 countries have national gender action plans in place. More than 95 countries have adopted quotas or other affirmative measures to increase women's representation in national legislatures, while 89 countries have adopted some form of legislation against gender-based violence. At the same time, what we have learned through the work on CEDAW and the Beijing Platform is that laws and policies can only go so far; the problem is implementation.
With implementation lagging, progress is lagging. This is why, 30 years after the First World Conference on Women in 1975, and 13 years after Beijing, it is still a woman's face we see when we speak of poverty, of violent conflict and social upheaval, of trafficking in human beings, and increasingly a young woman's face when we speak about HIV/AIDS. Thirteen years after the Platform for Action endorsed a target of 30 percent representation of women in decision-making positions, women still hold just under 17 percent of legislative seats worldwide, up from 12 percent in 1990. In CIS, they hold only 11 percent. While electing women to office does not by itself guarantee progress, their meagre representation sends a message that women are still not accepted as equal partners in national decision-making. And while women's participation in the workforce has grown in all regions, women's access to paid employment is lower than men's in most of the developing world. Women are less likely than men to hold paid and regular jobs and more often work in the informal economy, in jobs that are insecure, badly paid and lacking in all forms of social and legal protection.
This is particularly true in the CIS, where the scope and value of state subsidies has declined and with them the value of public sector jobs, in which women were predominantly located. With limited access to new job opportunities in the private sector, women are increasingly taking part-time jobs in the informal economy or dropping out of the labour force entirely, increasing their risk of poverty.
This is a picture of the cost of lagging implementation. The consequences for societies, as shown at the 2005 World Summit, include slow or stalled progress on eradicating poverty and hunger, reducing maternal and child mortality, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS. Acknowledging these links, the Secretary-General's follow-up report urged investment in women's empowerment in six critical areas, including increased access to education; secure tenure of property rights; equal access to labour market opportunities; greater representation in government decision-making bodies; access to sexual and reproductive health services, and the elimination of violence against women. The World Summit recognized that we cannot eradicate poverty without gender equality; we cannot stop the spread of HIV/AIDS without gender equality, we can't maximize the benefits of economic growth without gender equality. And today we are saying that we will not be able to turn aid effectiveness into development effectiveness without gender equality.
This is the second of a series of five regional consultations UNIFEM is co-hosting on gender and aid effectiveness — following on our joint conference with the European Commission in 2005, designed to build partnerships for, and track progress towards, including a gender perspective in the new aid effectiveness agenda. This agenda addresses aid effectiveness in terms of five elements — ownership, alignment, harmonization, results and accountability, with targets and indicators for each, offering important entry points to articulate concrete, coherent policy objectives. The findings of the 2006 OECD/DAC Survey on Monitoring the Paris Declaration shows how critical it is to use these to ensure gender equality and other cross-cutting issues are not lost.
In terms of national ownership of development planning and strategies, for example, it is clear that existing structures of ownership, primarily by elites, have not worked. The monitoring survey shows that ownership of the development process needs to be deepened by engaging parliaments and citizens more fully in planning and evaluation of development policies, and linking them more closely to budget and results frameworks. It is important to also make sure that such consultations not only take place but get into the policy decisions.
Second, in terms of the alignment of aid flows with national priorities, the survey finds that donors need to make better use of partners' national budgets and improve the transparency and predictability of aid flows by sharing information on planned and actual disbursements with budget authorities. One way to do this, as the OECD workshop on aid effectiveness concluded in Dublin last month is through gender-responsive budgeting, a proven tool for improving public financial management and ensuring proper allocation of resources to achieve national priorities.
Third, in terms of harmonization, the survey found that donors must work much harder to reduce the transaction costs of delivering and managing aid, for example, by increasing the use of local harmonization and alignment action plans, including sector-wide and programme-based approaches. This makes it critical to track the extent to which gender equality is reflected in such approaches as well as the extent to which joint gender assessment missions are carried out. Experience has shown that gender equality too often remains invisible in mainstream programming, missions and joint analytical work.
Fourth, in terms of managing for results, the report notes that donors need to further invest in capacity development and increase their use of country results reporting systems. This highlights the importance of the work by UN regional economic commissions, multilateral development banks and others to develop global gender equality indicators that can be measured and monitored on a national basis. A host of effective strategies have been developed in working to implement CEDAW, the Beijing Platform and the MDGs, and there is ongoing work to develop common indicators to assist countries to track fulfilment of commitments to the gender equality dimensions of all of these agreements. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, UNIFEM and UNDP jointly supported an initiative to harmonize gender equality indicators for reporting under CEDAW, the Beijing Platform and the Poverty Reduction Strategies, which are currently being prepared in seven countries of the CIS.
Finally, with regard to mutual accountability, the report stresses the need for donor and recipient countries to use country dialogue mechanisms to define a mutual aid agenda and discuss development results more explicitly in each country. We need to come up with strategies to broaden the meaning of accountability beyond donors to recipients and recipients to donors — to include accountability to constituencies. Without clear indicators of progress on gender equality in national development planning, accountability for on-the-ground progress towards this goal will remain elusive.
Here too, our combined experience in gender-responsive budget initiatives provides an entry point, expanding the capacity to increase accountability. By analyzing national budgets from a gender perspective, women have shone a spotlight on how men and women fare under prevailing resource allocation priorities — and increasingly, they are working with governments to get the kinds of adjustments needed to ensure greater equality. Gender budgets are a critical tool in good governance — transforming promises about gender equality into concrete reality.
A focus on enhanced national ownership, accountability, increased and more predictable aid should enhance progress towards gender equality and women's empowerment. These goals are firmly entrenched in the MDGs, have been by the 2005 World Summit, and have been translated into concrete regional and national level commitments. Yet without more visible efforts — by governments, UN partners, and increasingly importantly, civil society, gender equality and other cross-cutting issues will continue to be marginalized. We need to insist on the centrality of these issues to development and keep development at the centre of aid effectiveness.
In this connection, it is important to note the discussion now taking place among Member States on the need to establish "a consolidated United Nations gender equality and women's empowerment programme" that can pull together the normative and operational parts of the UN system in order to better assist Member States to deliver on gender equality commitments. Such an entity can serve to lower transaction costs for governments, for the UN system, and especially for civil society and women's groups, by ensuring there is a recognized interlocutor and entry point for gender equality within the UN Country Team. Where country ownership on these issues is lagging, a strengthened gender entity can find innovative ways to support and amplify the voice and influence of women's rights and gender equality advocates along with all of those who are demanding more equitable and inclusive societies.
These are the challenges that we will take on today as we begin our discussions today. Together we must develop a strong partnership for development effectiveness and gender equality and use the existing entry points to break through the implementation lag and reignite the momentum for progress in improving the lives of all women, everywhere.
