Gender Equality Central to Aid Effectiveness
UNIFEM Hosts Conference on New Aid Modalities in Commonwealth of Independent States
21 May 2007
Almaty — UNIFEM Executive Director Noeleen Heyzer yesterday underscored the central importance of focusing development efforts on advancing gender equality, warning that failure to do so would result in "slow or stalled progress on eradicating poverty and hunger, reducing maternal and child mortality and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS." Speaking in Almaty, Kazakhstan, she highlighted the need to place development at the centre of the aid effectiveness agenda. "It is only through a clear articulation of the human development mandate that cross-cutting issues of gender equality, human rights and sustainable environment will find strong expression in the new aid environment," she stated.
Ms. Heyzer made her remarks at a conference on "Gender Equality and Development Planning and Budgeting in the CIS" that was jointly organized by UNIFEM and the Government of Kazakhstan and brought together senior government officials, parliamentarians and women's groups from the CIS region as well as representatives of bilateral and multilateral donors. The conference is one of a series of five regional consultations UNIFEM is holding to build knowledge, capacity and partnerships to include a gender perspective in the aid effectiveness agenda and track results towards the 2008 High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Ghana that will review the Paris Declaration. The need for regional consultations was identified at an early global meeting on the topic organized together with the European Union in Brussels in November 2005.
Recent years have seen a considerable reshaping of the structures and financing of development cooperation. The Paris Declaration outlines the changing vision of aid allocation as increasingly driven by partnership between donor and recipient countries, and ownership of the development process by the recipients of aid. These shifts have raised important questions about implementation and the accountability of all development actors. At the national and international policy levels, they pose new challenges and present new opportunities for reaching internationally-agreed development objectives, such as the Millennium Development Goals. In this context it is important to see the Paris Declaration principles of national ownership, harmonization and accountability, devised to increase the impact of development assistance, as "important entry points to articulate concrete, coherent policy objectives."
"Without clear indicators of progress and performance on gender equality in national development planning, accountability for on-the-ground progress on this goal will remain elusive," said Ms. Heyzer, pointing out the need to implement the advances made in terms of laws and policies and to back this process with sufficient resources. "We have learned that laws and policies can only go so far; the problem is implementation. This is why it is still a woman's face we see when we speak of poverty, of violent conflict and social upheaval, of trafficking in human beings. We must break through the implementation lag and reignite the momentum for progress in improving the lives of women, everywhere."
