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Summary - Aid In Support Of Gender Equality And Women’s Empowerment, 2010

The Members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee have long recognised that sustainable development must fully reflect the needs of both women and men. The DAC adopted Guiding Principles to Aid Agencies for Supporting the Role of Women in Development in 1983 and revised them in 1989. Subsequent developments have now led to the formulation of new DAC Guidelines for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Development Co-operation (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/56/46/28313843.pdf page3). Data on DAC members’ aid targeting gender equality and women’s empowerment are compiled with the help of the gender equality marker in the Creditor Reporting System (CRS).

Guidelines are based on a partnership approach that emphasises leadership by partner governments and local actors. In this relationship, DAC Members have two complementary responsibilities:

  • to ensure the mainstreaming of equality considerations in their own processes and products (such as analyses, policies, position papers)
  • to support the efforts of partners to promote equality (including support to partner capacity to mainstream equality considerations into policies, strategies and programmes).

It is pointed out that full development cannot be attained unless women and the resources they represent are not integrated into the development process and a focus on gender equality in development co-operation is important to enhance the effectiveness of aid. Gender equality is explicitly promoted in activity documentation through specific measures which:

a) Reduce social, economic or political power inequalities between women and men, girls and boys, ensure that women benefit equally with men from the activity, or compensate for past discrimination;

b) Develop or strengthen gender equality or anti-discrimination policies, legislation or institutions.

This approach requires analysing gender inequalities either separately or as an integral part of agencies’ standard procedures. Examples of activities that could be marked as principal objective:

  • legal literacy for women and girls;
  • male networks against gender violence;
  • a social safety net project which focuses specifically on assisting women and girls as a particularly disadvantaged group in a society;
  • capacity building of Ministries of Finance and Planning to incorporate gender equality objectives in national poverty reduction or comparable strategies.

Such activities can target women specifically, men specifically or both women and men.

 

Examples of activities that could be marked as significant objective:

  • activity which has as its principal objective to provide drinking water to a district or community while at the same time ensuring that women and girls have safe and easy access to the facilities;
  • a social safety net project which focuses on the community as a whole and ensures that women and girls benefit equally with men and boys.

Therefore, an activity can target gender equality as a "principal objective" or "significant objective". Principal means gender equality was an explicit objective of the activity and fundamental in its design. Significant means gender equality was an important, but secondary, objective of the activity. Not targeted means that the activity was screened for promoting gender equality, but was found to not be targeted to it.

In this summary we take few examples to understand the nature of Aid in support of gender equality. In this line, considering the focus of donor’s aid program as in the case of the European Commission we find that in the total sector allocable aid amounting to USD 13119 million the gender equality focused aid is 16%. In case of UK, we find that the total allocable aid rose by 72% from 2007 to 2008, the gender equality focused aid rose by only 3 percentage points to 33%. Sector wise break-up of the gender equality focused aid suggests that it is education and other social infrastructure including women’s equality that is the largest component followed health and population and production for the European Commission. For UK the health and population sector is the major component.

In case of Japan, while the total sector allocable aid has seen a rise, the gender equality focused aid fell from 15% in 2007 to 7% in 2008. The major component of this aid was focused on the sector health and population. For Germany, 56% of the total allocable aid is gender equality focused and al large part of it is spent on health and population as well as economic infrastructure.