By IPS Correspondents
BERLIN, May 9 2005 (IPS)

A leading development agency has taken several measures to help bring women into the heart of new projects.

“Any development project has a gender aspect,” Juliane Osterhaus from GTZ, Germany’s biggest development aid company told IPS. GTZ had a turnover of 884 million Euros (1.1 billion dollars) last year, with more than 80 percent projects undertaken for the German government.

GTZ has adopted a policy that gender equality must be addressed in each project.

Osterhaus points to awareness campaigns and education projects as effective strategies to secure that aim. With the help of these it is possible to make a difference very soon, she said.

In Nicaragua GTZ cooperated with the national police to train officers on how to deal with female victims of violence. ”This is a highly political issue,” said Osterhaus.

In Malawi GTZ offers training in prevention of gender-based violence; in Cambodia it has been working to enhance the capacity of the ministry of women’s affairs to mainstream gender aspects in the legal system.

GTZ studies found that two-thirds of female participants in a microfinance project in India said microcredit had helped improve their self-confidence, their status in the family and their ability to cope with social problems. The project was open to both men and women, but 90 percent of the borrowers were women’s groups.

Gender equality cuts across several of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; and the reversal of the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases by 2015.

The goals were agreed at a summit of world leaders in September 2000. The leaders agreed to close the gap between girls and boys going to primary and secondary school by 2005, and at all levels of education by 2015.

Gender equality is measured by the ratio of boys to girls in primary, secondary and higher education; the ratio of literate women to men aged 15 to 24, the share of women in non-agricultural wage employment, and the proportion of seats held by women in the national parliament.

”Gender equality is a cross-cutting goal for all the other goals. Therefore none of the MDGs can be achieved without the realisation of the gender equality goal,” Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) told IPS.

”The issue here is no longer the normative, nor the legal or policy. The issue now is one of implementation and accountability,” said Heyzer. She added that effective strategies had to be upgraded, upscaled and adequately resourced with personnel, infrastructure and finance.

Many regions have already reached this goal, including several in sub-Saharan Africa, Heyzer said. UN data shows that in 2001 more than half of sub-Saharan countries had at least a ratio of nine girls per 10 boys in primary education. These countries include Botswana and Namibia, where more than 80 percent of all kids go to primary school.

Tanzania is close to gender parity in basic education, but less than 60 percent of children go to school. In Burkina Faso, Djibuti and Niger only a third of the kids go to school, with just seven girls per ten boys in primary school.

Rwanda is the ‘top pupil’ in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 80 percent of all boys and girls equally have access to primary education. And the country is world champion in the share of women in parliament – 49 percent.

Sweden comes close to achieving an equal share of women in parliament. But Rwanda is way ahead of Germany (33 percent), Britain (18 percent) and Italy (12 percent).

Besides countries like the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait where women are not allowed to run for a seat in the national assembly, countries with five percent or less include Ukraine, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Armenia and Bangladesh.

Heyzer said national statistics do not always provide an adequate perspective. ”China and India have already reached several goals, but within India and China there are localities where these goals have not been achieved. We have to go village by village.”

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