Development & Aid, Europe, Headlines, Poverty & SDGs

DEVELOPMENT-EU: Action Urged Over Gender Equality

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Oct 19 2004 (IPS) - The European Union must step up its efforts to ensure that “gender mainstreaming” is central to its development agenda, leading development groups are urging.

CONCORD, which represents some 1,500 European non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for development and relief says “major gaps” in the European Union (EU) commitment to gender equality need to be filled.

Otherwise, it says the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed by heads of state in September 2000 will not be achieved.

“The gender perspective is vital in the fight against poverty and in promoting sustainable development, yet in 2002 allocations under the ‘Women in Development’ category amounted to only 0.2 percent of total European Community Official Development Assistance,” CONCORD said in a briefing paper prepared for a special two-day development meeting that ended Tuesday. “The policy exists, but more needs to be done to put it into practice.”

Gender mainstreaming is defined by the group as a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences integral to the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and social spheres.

The group aims to raise awareness of the most pressing challenges facing the EU development agenda amongst parliamentarians, NGOs and other European stakeholders.

Outlining CONCORD’s concerns at a round table discussion on gender and development, Zohra Khan from the human rights group One World Action said the EU must take concrete steps to ensure that gender equality is maintained in its development cooperation.

Khan said assessments of the bloc’s efforts to mainstream gender in its development cooperation activities have identified some major challenges for the EU including a need to improve accountability and to ensure policy coherence.

“Responsibility for gender mainstreaming should rest at the highest level – with commissioners, heads of units and head of delegations,” she said. “Institutional capacity needs to be improved. Increased emphasis is needed to ensure policy coherence on gender equality with other development-related policies such as trade, external relations, humanitarian aid, security, migration, agriculture and HIV/AIDS.”

CONCORD is also urging the EU to increase financial and human resource allocation for gender mainstreaming and to strengthen dialogue with civil society.

“Specific gender mainstreaming initiatives should be targeted at sectors and regions that are not traditionally strong on gender but receive a high percentage of Community aid,” Khan said.

Maria Martens, member of the European Parliament (MEP) from the European People’s Party and member of the parliament’s development committee, said that the role of women is “fundamental” to development and poverty eradication.

“The importance of women is not in our heads enough when we talk about development, but their role is crucial. When women participate in development poverty is reduced. The MDGs cannot be achieved without them,” she said.

In a direct appeal to the European Parliament, the only directly-elected body of the EU, CONCORD asked MEPs to take action to ensure that gender equality is high on the bloc’s agenda.

Such measures include a request for a detailed annual report on the progress made in gender mainstreaming, a reinforcement of “structured dialogue” between women’s groups and a strengthening of EU commitment to “a twin track approach on allocating resources to gender mainstreaming and specific measures promoting women’s rights.”

Khan said that the EC lacks a system to track the gender impact of direct budget support. “We want each delegation to put a monitoring system in place to measure the support to gender equality objectives under this new type of aid,” Khan said.

Mario Loprieno from the European Commission’s directorate-general for development acknowledged that although “much has been achieved” in gender mainstreaming, “a big challenge” remains.

“We are not only looking to mainstream gender equality but we want to promote it. While we’re following the institutional process of mainstreaming, for the first time we are also giving it a strong political direction and link it to the Millennium Development Goals,” he said.