It is now recognized that sustainable human development cannot be achieved without gender equality. Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 hinges on making tangible progress with regard to gender equality and women’s empowerment, not only as a goal in itself (MDG 3), but also in the achievement of all the other goals. When women are integrated meaningfully into the labour force, there are impressive advances in social well-being. When women are empowered, there are better health and education outcomes for their children as well as a more sustainable use of natural resources.
Maintaining and scaling up investments in gender equality is especially important in the context of the current global economic crisis. Projections of sharply reduced economic growth, rising unemployment, tightening credit conditions, falling remittances, and compressed aid flows will likely deepen deprivation around the world and seriously impede, if not reverse, progress towards the attainment of the MDGs, including MDG 3. In this context, it is especially important to optimise the use of scarce aid funds and protect and scale up recent achievements towards the attainment of gender equality.
This publication provides knowledge on successful practices and approaches that governments, donors and civil society can take to make the MDGs work better for women. It reviews the successes and challenges faced in meeting MDG targets and the extent to which national reports have addressed gender in reporting on each goal. It concludes with a set of key recommendations for advancing progress towards achieving gender equality.
This publication draws on a range of monitoring reports, analytical assessments, action guides and training modules developed and published by various stakeholders including UN agencies and task forces, the World Bank and other donors, women’s networks and individual gender experts.
Recommendations:
- In order to advance gender equality, governments need to target both domestic resources and external assistance to support gender equality priorities. Additionally, governments and donor partners need to strengthen accountability systems to track and enhance their contributions to gender equality; carry out gender-sensitive progress assessments and performance monitoring and develop indicators to assess the contribution of aid to development effectiveness.
- The emphasis on national ownership in aid relationships provides a key opportunity for both national and donor partners to ensure that women—particularly women living in poverty—play a meaningful role in articulating their own needs and in making sure that these are addressed. This includes strengthening their position in governments, in parliaments and in civil society.
- Gender-responsive budgets (GRBs) are one way of ensuring that accountability systems linked to public expenditure at various levels have a gender perspective. Gender-sensitive indicators on resource flows to local levels are needed to assess how effectively local government spending addresses women’s needs.
- Harmonisation may offer the best opening for introducing gender equality assessments of aid effectiveness, but it will be challenging if countries do not agree on a baseline and clear indicators upon which to establish the gender equality factors. This requires the involvement of multiple stakeholders form community, national and global levels, especially gender equality advocates and human rights experts. It would also require substantial resources to be earmarked for its success, implementation and follow up.
- Gender-sensitive indicators need to be part of monitoring and evaluation frameworks to track gender impacts and ensure that aid is reaching those it is intended to serve. The capacity to collect, analyse and utilise sex-disaggregated data will need to be strengthened.
