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Development Financing & Gender Equality – Persistent Challenges

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Date: September 7, 2015

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http://epthinktank.eu/2015/06/16/development-financing-and-gender-equality-a-virtuous-circle/

Development Financing & Gender
Equality

 

Written by Rosamund Shreeves

 

 

It is now 20 years since
governments across the world and international donors – including the European
Union (EU) and individual Member States – committed to working towards gender equality
and empowering women and girls at the fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing. This year also marks the
culmination of the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), which included gender equality as a
stand-alone goal (MDG 3).
The process of adopting a post-2015
development agenda and specific sustainable development goals (SDGs),
has been marked by wide-ranging reviews of the
progress achieved, the persisting inequalities and the new gendered challenges
arising in connection with evolving risks,
such as increasing
inequality, armed conflict,
migration
and the effects of climate change.
Scaled up and effective financing
will be necessary to meet a new gender equality goal beyond 2015.

 

“We cannot fulfill 100% of the world’s potential by excluding
50% of the world’s people. The evidence is clear: equality for women means
progress for all.” Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General

 

Why gender equality
and the empowerment of women and girls matters for development

 

Development financing and gender equality – a virtuous circle

 

One of the lessons learned
over the past 20 years is that macro-level economic and development policies
can have different impacts on women and men, girls and boys, as a result of the
gender roles
ascribed to them and the connected power relations, division of labour and
access to and control over resources. There is also now increasingly ample evidence
that gender inequalities can have a negative impact on development outcomes,
hampering poverty alleviation and restricting the potential to increase
wellbeing. Conversely, as well as benefiting individual women and girls,
closing gender gaps can benefit men and boys,
societies, businesses
and economies
as a whole. Investing in gender equality can therefore accelerate progress
towards other development goals, such as food security,
and create a virtuous circle
for sustainable
development. As an issue of human rights and justice, gender
equality is important in its own right. From this perspective, empowering women
and girls gives them greater agency
to get their voices heard and orient development in ways that meet their needs.

 

Although progress
has been made in some areas, notably gender parity in access to primary
education, it has been slow, and large gender gaps have persisted
globally. No country in the world has eradicated gender inequality.

 

Development
cooperation, in partnership with national governments and civil society,
particularly women’s
organisations, can have an impact in crucial areas including:

 

 

 

 

  • Enhancing
    the participation of women and girls in decision-making,
    both inside and outside the family;

 

 

 

 

 

Financing for Gender
Equality – Achievements and Challenges

 

The volume and
focus of funding

 

The Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has reported
that aid targeted at gender equality by its members has more than tripled over
the course of the MDGs, from US$8 billion in 2002 to US$28 billion in 2012, but
that, despite the upward trend, investments are ‘vastly insufficient to
achieve gender equality and only a small proportion of aid addresses
women’s specific needs’. EU,
and other,
aid has tended to be focused on a handful
of sectors. UN Women has also highlighted that ‘persistent and chronic
underinvestment‘ has been an obstacle to progress. Women’s
organisations, often engaged in long-term work to change deep-rooted,
structural causes of inequality, saw a drop
in their funding as donors turned to shorter, more measurable projects.

 

Development financing and gender equality – a virtuous circle

 

The Effectiveness
of Funding

 

It is not only the
volume, but also the effectiveness of financing that is important, how gender
issues are built in to its design and implementation and how impacts and
outcomes are monitored and assessed. Strategies and tools – specifically the
use of gender-disaggregated
data and indicators and gender-responsive
budgeting – have been developed to ensure that financing is
gender-sensitive. A recent EU-sponsored programme
has helped to further develop best practice and demonstrated the added value
such tools can bring. However, knowledge and take-up of such guidance, by
countries and donors alike, is patchy, as noted in a recent evaluation
of EU support.

 

New and Innovative
Forms of Funding

 

The financing
landscape is also changing. Official development aid (ODA) continues to be a
central source of financing for development, as shown in the EU’s reiteration
of its pledge
to collectively reach the 0.7% ODA/GNI target. However, aid
effectiveness agreements have also led to a focus on new kinds
of partnership and funding for development. These include : the mobilisation of
domestic financial resources, private-sector funding, philanthropy, and revenue
from combating tax evasion and illegal financial flows and from better coordination.
From a gender perspective, these forms of financing offer both opportunities and
challenges. Innovations such as the Global Financing
Facility (GFF) and the Brazilian Bolsa familia
scheme target women directly. However, research by the women’s organisation,
Gender and Development Network, has highlighted
that new financing is not gender neutral and that its benefits and pitfalls
need to be explored.

 

Outlook: The UN
conference on financing for development and the UN summit to adopt sustainable
development goals (SDGs)

 

How the post-2015
agenda is financed and implemented will be determined at the Third International Conference on
Financing for Development (FfD3) to be held in Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia, in July 2015. Efforts to ensure that the FfD3 outcome document is
gender-sensitive and contains scaled up commitments to support an ambitious new
stand-alone goal on gender equality and women’s rights are on-going.
Advocacy groups have issued recommendations,
statements,
and comments
on the successive drafts of the document.

 

For its part, in
the Council
Conclusions on Gender in Development, the European Union has
backed the ‘twin-track approach’ of combining a stand-alone goal on gender
equality and empowering women and girls with comprehensive gender
mainstreaming. It has also highlighted the need to align commitments with
financing in the FfD3 process.

 

The European
Parliament makes specific mention of the need for a gender perspective in
financing in its Resolution
on the EU and the global development framework after 2015, Resolution
on Financing for Development and the Report
on tax avoidance and tax evasion as challenges for governance, social
protection and development in developing countries (Elly Schlein, S&D,
Italy). MEPs will be part of the EU delegation attending the FfD3 conference.

 

Sources & Further Reading

 

I/ Why gender equality and the empowerment of women and
girls matters for development

 

1) The current situation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2) Interconnections between gender equality and
development outcomes

 

  • Why Women
    Matter: the Story of Microcredit    / Lott, C.E. Journal of Law
    and Commerce, Vol. 27, No. 2, University of Pittsburgh, 2009. How
    providing financial services and access to women can trigger a powerful
    multiplier effect with benefits for individuals, households and local
    communities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Gender
    equality and economic growth: is there a win-win?    / Kabeer,
    N., and Natali, L., IDS Working Paper, Volume 2013 No. 417, February 2013.
    Finds evidence that gender equality, particularly in education and
    employment, contributes to economic growth is far more consistent and
    robust than the relationship that economic growth contributes to gender
    equality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Women in
    agriculture: Closing the gender gap for development    / Food
    and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome, 2011. The report
    documents the gender gap in agriculture and the gains in productivity and
    other economic and social benefits of closing it. It estimates that
    bringing the yields on the land farmed by women up to the levels achieved
    by men would increase agricultural output in developing countries between
    2.5 and 4 per cent. This increase in production would in turn reduce the
    number of hungry people in the world by between 12–17 per cent or a
    minimum of 100 million people.

 

 

 

 

  • Gender and
    food security in brief    / Aboud, G.; Ballara, M. and Brody,
    A., Bridge, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK, 2015. 8p. Argues
    that tackling gender injustice and truly empowering women is not only a
    fundamental prerequisite for improving food and nutrition security. It
    needs to be seen as a goal in its own right.

 

 

 

II/ Financing for gender equality – achievements and
challenges

 

Statistical data on funding for gender equality and
women’s rights

 

Analysis of the data on funding for GEWE

 

 

 

Assessments of EU support to gender equality and women’s
empowerment (GEWE)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assessments of GEWE funding in specific sectors

 

 

  • Costing and
    Financing 1325    , 2010: Analysis of resources needed
    to implement Security Council Resolution 1325 at national level as well as
    the gains, gaps and glitches of financing the women peace and security
    agenda. Case studies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outcome documents from the United Nations Conferences on
Financing for Development:

 

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