Gender

Gender Equality in development cooperation

Gender equality is an important end in itself. That is why it is one of the UN's Millennium Development Goals. It is also fundamental to reducing poverty and achieving other development goals.

Links with poverty

Gender inequality and poverty are closely related. It is not just that women have lower incomes and are less wealthy; poverty in the narrow financial sense is compounded by women's lack of political power and unequal access to:

basic human rights
employment
information
social services
infrastructure
natural resources.

EU policy framework for promoting gender equality

The crucial significance of gender equality in development policies is recognised in various policy documents among others in:

the 2005 european consensus on development (where Gender Equality is identified asa cross-cutting issue)
the 2007 Commission Communication on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Development Cooperation and the related Council conclusions. The 2007 paper on equality and empowerment is the first step towards a coordinated European approach to promoting gender equality and empowering women through development cooperation. It identifies five areas for action and provides guidelines on how to work gender equality into other development policies more effectively. In particular, it describes how gender equality can be furthered through new forms of aid such as budget support and sector-based aid, which are starting to replace traditional methods of supporting individual projects. The paper promotes:

equal rights (political, civil, economic, social and cultural)
equal access to, and control of, resources
equal opportunities to exercise political and economic influence.

Policy implementation

The Thematic Programme “Investing in People” contains a separate financial envelope for the period 2007-2013 for funding EC actions in the area of promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women. The available funding of € 57 M is almost three times higher than in the previous three years (when € 3 M were directly spent on gender specific actions on annual average). Funding is allocated through calls for proposals, and by direct agreements with selected partners. Priorities include:

implementing international commitments at country level
supporting women's NGOs
helping governments produce better statistics broken down by gender.

Efforts have been made to ensure that gender issues are properly incorporated into strategy papers and EU staff have detailed guidelines on addressing gender equality in country and regional programming.

Top

Partnerships and International fora

There is a wide spread international cooperation on various UN initiatives:

ongoing work to implement the Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women
follow-up to the Beijing Platform of Action through the Commission on the status of women, and major reviews (most recently Beijing +10 in 2005)
the Millennium Development Goals.

The collaboration with the EU Member States’ gender experts and also with the DAC/OECD gender network provides fora for exchange of information, best practice and policy on gender mainstreaming to further increase aid effectiveness.

The EU works with women's organisations and NGOs that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment at international, national and regional level - in particular One World Action, Aprodev, WIDE and BRIDGE.

Top