[APWW-Meet] "Where Women Can't Thrive, MDGs Are in Jeopardy"

[Roberto Savio <soros@other-net.info>]

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"Where Women Can't Thrive, MDGs Are in Jeopardy"

Interview with Ines Alberdi, executive director of UNIFEM

ROME, Aug 28 (IPS) - Ines Alberdi has worked for over 25 years on gender
issues and in politics.

She comes to the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) from
her previous position as professor of sociology at Madrid University
where she has taught political sociology and sociology of gender since
1993. Prior to that, she was director for research at the Centre for
Sociological Research. Her main interest has been gender-based violence.


"It is crucial to see the women's rights movement in this context of
creating more democratic, equitable, and just societies that benefit the
population as a whole. And I devoted my professional life to this
cause," she says.=20

Alberdi spoke to IPS Editor in Chief Miren Gutierrez about the role of
UNIFEM.=20

IPS: UNIFEM talks about the importance of incorporating gender into
national poverty reduction strategies. How is this done?=20

Ines Alberdi: National poverty reduction strategies are particularly
important entry points to ensure that women's needs will be taken into
account. It is based on these plans that governments allocate resources
and donors contribute to national budgets or to specific sectors. To
have a strong gender perspective incorporated at this planning stage is
therefore crucial.=20

Gender advocates and women's machineries must therefore be closely
involved in devising national development plans. UNIFEM's work has
focused on opening policy spaces, for example in the CIS (Commonwealth
of Independent States) countries. As Kyrgyzstan began formulating its
new development strategy, UNIFEM worked with civil society organisations
to raise the profile of gender equality measures. These encompass
measures to increase women's political participation, perform gender
analysis of school curricula, reflect gender differences in pension
reform and end violence against women.=20

Kyrgyzstan has also pioneered a set of gender-responsive development
indicators, harmonised to capture both national priorities and
international commitments to gender equality, such as those in the
Beijing Platform for Action, CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women) and the MDGs (Millennium
Development Goals).=20

IPS: UNIFEM is working with the private sector in Rwanda, for example,
in order to create opportunities for women. Why would private companies
cooperate?=20

IA: The question would rather be: why would companies not care to create
opportunities for women? Women represent an enormous potential for the
private sector to tap into. Just look at the IT (information technology)
sector. In Rwanda we have worked with companies to develop ICT
(Information and Communication Technologies) scholarships for girls and
young women in learning institutions to enable them in a later stage in
their lives to compete in the labour market or run their own businesses.


UNIFEM has very successfully pursued a similar approach with global IT
company CISCO systems, initially in Jordan and now also in Morocco where
we helped introduce training for women in 12 out of 43 Cisco networking
academies. Today, nearly half the 900 students in the E-Quality
academies are women - about 60 percent find jobs within the first three
months after graduation.=20

Globally, research has shown that companies benefit from greater
corporate representation of women. In analysing the companies that make
up the Fortune 500, it was found that companies with the highest
representation of women in management positions delivered 35.1 percent
more return on equity and 34 percent more total return to shareholders
than companies with the lowest representation.=20

IPS: UNIFEM is training government officials and women's organisations
on how to insert gender into budgets. What are the challenges?=20

IA: UNIFEM has worked in some 40 countries over the past eight years to
build the capacity of governments and women's organisations.
Gender-responsive budgeting examines how the allocation of public funds
benefits women and men equally. It also analyses how women and men are
taxed. This analysis must be informed by up-to-date, sex-disaggregated
data. By pointing out imbalances in addressing women's needs and rights,
gender responsive budgeting helps governments correct inequalities.=20

Initiatives are currently underway for example in Morocco, Senegal,
Mozambique and Ecuador - and the results are impressive. Morocco now
produces annual gender reports which accompany the national budgets and
spell out how the allocation of public resources through the
government's departments will address gender equality priorities.=20

Trends toward decentralisation have seen local governments emerge as key
actors ... UNIFEM is responding by providing support to local
gender-responsive budget initiatives to strengthen women's
representation in local bodies and support their effective participation
in budget processes.=20

Take Cochabamba, Bolivia, for example, where many men have left to seek
work abroad, creating a shortage of skills traditionally performed by
men. Financed by the municipal government, women now learn how to fill
that gap: they learn how to be carpenters and brick layers. And while
the women are at work, their children are taken care of in a sports
programme catering equally to boys and girls, also paid by the local
government. Both initiatives are the result of a new focus on
gender-responsive budgeting in Cochabamba.=20

IPS: How could the Accra Action Agenda (AAA) ensure that the improvement
of aid quality contributes to gender equality?=20

IA: Over a billion women worldwide continue to be trapped in poverty,
and where women can't thrive, national development strategies and
progress towards the MDGs are in jeopardy. It is very obvious that there
can be no aid effectiveness without a focus on gender equality.=20

To ensure this, three measures are critical: First, gender equality
advocates and women's ministries must be much stronger involved in
decisions on development; second, gender-responsive budgeting must be
applied across all sectors; and third, accountability mechanisms -- such
as gender-sensitive indicators in performance assessments and the
collection of sex-disaggregated data -- must be put in place to track
progress.=20

UNIFEM has worked for the past two years with the EC (European
Community) and the International Training Centre of the International
Labour Organisation to ensure that gender equality and women's
empowerment are fully incorporated in national development planning,
programming, budgeting and monitoring. Country-level data gathered
through the EC/U.N. Partnership shows that the Paris Declaration, and
the principles on which it is based, have helped to open some spaces to
allow gender-equality advocates, civil society and parliamentarians to
actively participate in national development planning at different
levels.=20

For these groups to have real impact, however, government and donors
must go further and ensure that they are part of the entire development
planning, programming, budgeting and monitoring process.=20

The Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness offers a pivotal
opportunity for governments and donors to come together to deepen the
dialogue on how they can accelerate achievements in gender equality
through enhanced cooperation. It is an opportunity that is not to be
missed.=20

IPS: This year is especially important because it culminates with the
Follow-up International Conference on Financing for Development to
Review the Monterrey Consensus (MC) in Doha (Qatar). What are the main
issues UNIFEM is pushing?=20

IA: Gender equality advocates were disappointed with the MC. As a
contribution to international gender equality commitments, the Consensus
was not particularly strong.=20

The initial signs of the review of the MC implementation allow for some
optimism that the Doha outcome document will be much stronger and tackle
inequalities. The key report by the UN secretary-general's on the
process clearly states that macroeconomic policies should take into
account tax issues, business cycles, employment and the unpaid so-called
'care economy'.=20

The initial Doha draft outcome document presented by the co-chairs, the
Ambassadors of Egypt and Norway, has positioned gender equality as one
of the four new challenges and emerging issues, together with climate
change, the commodity prices crisis of food and energy and the poverty
eradication challenges facing middle-income countries. It also makes
specific references to the importance of gender responsive public
financial management, the oft neglected area, the consideration of
gender issues in micro- and macro economic policies, and the need to
remove gender biases in labour and financial markets as well as in the
ownership of assets and property rights.=20

These are important issues for UNIFEM. It is by now widely recognised
that women's empowerment and gender equality are key drivers to build
food security, reduce poverty, reduce maternal mortality, safeguard the
environment, and enhance the effectiveness of aid. Women are equally
important agents of economic development and we need policies that not
only recognise this but also actively support it.=20

IPS: Women make up most of the migrants from countries like the
Philippines. Could you quantify women's economic power?=20

IA: Women constitute half of the world's migrants by now and globally,
recorded remittances are estimated to be as high as 240 billion dollars
annually, so there you have an enormous economic contribution.=20

For women to realise their full potential we have to look at
macroeconomic policy frameworks - or the lack thereof - that take a
gender perspective into account.=20

Women need also to be afforded equal access to land and natural
resources, which is still far too often not the case. And public
investments have to take women's needs into account. Safe public
transport for example, may facilitate women's access to employment.
Where these services are lacking it is more difficult for women to
contribute as full economic agents.=20

It has been estimated that over the past decade, women's work has
contributed more to global growth than has China. But don't forget:
women also do more than two-thirds of the world's unpaid work - the
equivalent of 11 trillion dollars or almost 50 percent of world GDP,
according to a global UNDP (U.N. Development Programme) study from 1995.
This enormous economic contribution is beyond their paid wage
employment.=20

IPS: In places like Mozambique, you see a high level of economic
participation, while women make only 35 percent of Parliament and 13
percent of the government. In Ghana, there is a similar situation. Why
is political representation low?=20

IA: When you look at countries who have made gains in terms of increases
in women's political participation, they have generally applied some
kind of temporary affirmative action measures or quotas - which is an
expression of political will to act on women's empowerment. What we are
learning is that both economic empowerment and political participation
require breaking through glass ceilings in systems that have
traditionally discriminated against women. And they are mutually
reinforcing; both are essential for achieving gender equality, but
neither is sufficient in and by itself. (END/2008)=20

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