WUNRN
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AWID - Association for Women's
Rights in Development
The
Paris Declaration: Women's Rights Concerns
A summary of the analysis presented in 'Implementing the Paris Declaration:
Implications for the Promotion of Women's Rights and Gender Equality,' a
paper developed by AWID and WIDE, and commissioned by the
Canadian
Council on International Cooperation.
By Kathambi Kinoti - AWID
Seventy per cent of the people living in poverty worldwide are women. The
key dimensions of this phenomenon are the expansion of female-headed
households, the persistence of intra household inequalities and bias
against women and girls, and the implementation of neoliberal economic
policies around the world.
The main aim of the aid effectiveness agenda is supposed to be the
reduction of poverty and the achievement of the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs). The framework for the aid effectiveness agenda, the Paris
Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, purports to make the delivery and
management of aid more efficient and effective. Yet nothing in the Paris
Declaration directly or fundamentally addresses the gendered nature of
poverty. The only reference that the document makes to gender equality is
fleeting: 'Similar harmonisation efforts [that is, similar to the harmonised
approach to environmental impact assessments] are also needed on
other cross-cutting issues, such as gender equality and other thematic
issues including those financed by dedicated funds.' According to women's
rights advocates, the Paris Declaration is fundamentally flawed since no
development can occur without women's rights being fully respected and
guaranteed.
The Paris Declaration is grounded on five principles for the reform of aid
delivery and management. The interpretation of each of the
principles
has implications for women's rights and gender equality.
1. Ownership: This principle requires that countries that are aid
recipients take the lead in setting their development agenda.
Country ownership is not clearly defined in the Paris Declaration,
but it is implied that country ownership is equivalent to government
ownership, which in most cases is not democratic. Democratic
ownership of national development programmes should involve all citizens
including women's organizations in the formulation and delivery of policies
and programmes.
The primary indicators of country ownership have been the Poverty Reduction
Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and related development plans. While PRSPs are
drafted by recipient countries' governments, ultimately they must be
approved by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This
means that they must conform to the interests of these international
funding institutions (IFIs). These IFIs have the final say instead of the
people who should be the beneficiaries of aid, the majority of whom are
women.
2.
Alignment: Donor countries are required to base their overall support on
recipient countries' national
development strategies, institutions and procedures. This principle has
been translated by donors into alignment with national budgets and hence
direct budget support. For women's rights advocates, this is highly
problematic.
Gender equality is rarely prioritized within national budgets, and neither
is there a participatory process for defining national priorities.
An additional problem is that as more bi- and multilateral funding gets
diverted towards general government budget support, less is available for
specific women's rights and gender equality programmes.
3. Harmonisation: This principle requires donor countries to work so that
their actions are more harmonised, transparent and collectively effective.
One concern is that donors could use this principle to continue developing
or strengthening their conditionalities and using aid as a tool to impose
economic or trade policies. There is also
a risk that harmonisation could result in too narrow a framework based on
the policies of the least progressive donor and consequently a restriction
of the development agenda.
4. Managing for results: This principle states that all countries will
manage resources and improve decision-making for results. From a gender
equality perspective, this can only happen if sex disaggregated data and
gender analysis are integrated into monitoring, implementation and
evaluation processes. Adherence to human rights principles and to the legal
obligations of donors and recipient governments should be used to measure
the effectiveness of policies and programmes. These should include the
requirements of the Convention for the Elimination of all forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Platform for
Action(BPfA), MDG targets and indicators.
5. Mutual accountability: Donor and developing countries pledge that they
will be mutually accountable for development results. This can only be
possible where there is the existence of a strong, independent,
well-resourced civil society. In many countries, women's rights
organizations have significant challenges in securing accountability from
their governments. This is an additional challenge when the primary focus
of aid effectiveness is technical procedures of disbursement and accounting
rather than the actual impact of aid on the ground. There are also limited
opportunities for women's rights advocates to hold donor countries and IFIs
to account.
The 'new' aid modalities that have emerged to support the implementation of
the Paris Declaration pose significant challenges for women's rights and
gender equality. These modalities include Budget support, Sector Wide
Approaches (SWAps), Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), Basket
Funding and Joint Assistance Strategies. While these come in the context of
a scaling up of aid flows generally, they tend to result in a scaling down
of specific financing for women's rights and gender equality. The primary
reason for this is that these modalities are not en-gendered and there is a
lack of political will to ensure gender equality is one of the main pillars
of development.
Women's rights advocates have made recommendations for the strengthening of
gender equality and women's rights
perspectives within the aid effectiveness agenda.
1. Donors and governments should deliver on their gender equality
commitments. This includes delivering on their commitments under
international human rights frameworks and key agreements on women's rights
and development such as the BPfA, CEDAW and the MDGs. They must also ensure
adequate financial resources to accomplish their commitments towards gender
equality, human rights and development. In addition there must be effective
involvement of national machineries for gender equality in development
planning and implementation and in the aid effectiveness agenda.
2. There must be a strengthening of democratic ownership and women's
participation in the aid effectiveness agenda. Donors and governments need
to strengthen public awareness about the Paris Declaration and the
centrality of gender equality. They need to promote mechanisms for
effective participation by citizens and civil society organizations,
including women's organizations in the planning, monitoring and evaluation
of development processes. There should also be better communication and
engagement between civil society organizations, women's rights groups,
local governments and Parliaments as a way to develop ownership of
development decisions. It is very important that there be the promotion of
autonomous and responsive aid support to civil society development actors
including women's organizations with inclusive new aid mechanisms.
3. Gender equality should be included in the monitoring and evaluation of
the Paris Declaration. This includes
utilizing gender-based instruments such as gender responsive budgets and
gender audits for monitoring. Donors and governments should develop
statistics disaggregated by sex to monitor gender gaps, and donors should
develop local capacities to collect, analyze and strategically disseminate
the data.
4. Guidelines and tools on the contribution of the new aid modalities to
national obligations to gender equality should be developed. There should
also be documentation of the experiences of gender advocacy and promotion
in the PRSP processes, and the provision of an analysis of women's poverty
in direct relationship to the national macroeconomic policy.
The Paris Declaration makes aid delivery and management a highly technical
process that gives insufficient
attention to the impact that aid has on the achievement of development
goals. One of the reasons for this is that civil society participation on
issues of aid effectiveness has been limited, focussed on specific
consultations. In the upcoming Third High Level Forum (HLF 3) that will be
held in Accra, Ghana in September this year, there will be opportunities
for civil society engagement, even though it seems that gender equality
will not be a priority in the HLF3 programme. It is important that civil
society organizations strongly engage in the lead-up to the Accra HLF and
beyond particularly by promoting women's organizations as key stakeholders
in the aid effectiveness process.
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Reference:
AWID and WIDE (2008), Alemany, C. et al. 'Implementing the Paris
Declaration: Implications for the Promotion of Women's Rights and Gender
Equality.' January 2008.
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