Gender Equality and Aid Effectiveness
2 Sep 2008
2 Sep 2008
Adopted in 2005, the Paris Declaration (PD) on Aid Effectiveness is the most recent framework on the management of development aid assistance agreed by the donor community in the OECD in partnership with some southern governments. Its implementation wants to contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Goals by 2015.
Despite the commitments by donor and southern countries to the PD principles, civil society organisations (CSOs) state that the Paris Declaration remains a narrow, unjust and unequal framework for understanding development effectiveness. From the side of women's rights organisations, the position we have been promoting ahead of the upcoming third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, is based on the certainty that there can be no aid effectiveness without development effectiveness and that gender equality, human rights and environment must be recognised as crucial areas for development effectiveness. In this sense, the women's groups understand than the legitimate space for norm-setting on aid and international cooperation issues should be under the United Nations.
Assessing the process towards Accra, one can say that compared to 2005 (the Paris Declaration is gender blind), there have been some improvement in terms of recognising the importance of gender equality and women's rights. Thus, the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) emphasise the central place of poverty reduction and human rights in development policy and the importance of cross-cutting issues such as gender equality, and environmental sustainability. The AAA also recognise the need to improve access to sex-disaggregated data. However, the AAA fails in explicitly recognise the need for coherence with international agreements on human rights, gender equality, environmental sustainability and decent work as frameworks for aid relationships. As well as in including specific indicators to measure these commitments to gender equality, human rights and environmental sustainability at the practical level. Thus, there is no real change of direction.
Broader CSO, including women's rights organisations, are also very concerned with the outcomes of the last AAA version. As stated in the ISG response to the 25th July draft of the AAA "not enough progress has been made in making aid work for poor people", especially from the donors side. The consequences of it could be inaction in improving aid quality and impact, and marginalised groups, poor populations, and women are particularly affected by this lack of comprehensive actions to eradicate poverty and inequalities.
We would like to highlight here too that the debates around "positive conditionalities" hasn't helped much (were even harmful) in moving forward gender equality and women's rights in the Paris framework. Many women's rights groups don't support this approach. Contributing to these debate, one key demand from the Women's Working Group on Financing for Development (FfD) is to remove all policy conditionalities, including conditionalities related to gender equality and other so-called "positive conditionalities" and instead strengthen mutual responsibility, accountability and transparency of donors and southern countries towards their gender equality and human rights commitments at regional and international level. Aid assistance should truly support national owned plans towards implementing these commitments, rather than imposed them.
In few days, over 1000 representatives from multilateral development agencies, bilateral development agencies and southern governments will meet to finally agree their 2008-2010 action plan on aid effectiveness. Its impact in making progress towards sustainable development and the achievement of the MDGs depends now on the real political will of multilateral agencies, donor and southern government representatives to address the obstacles. Thus, the AAA must include more ambitious, concrete and time-bound commitments so that progress can be monitored and donors and governments can be held to account. Women's group will organize the Accra Women's Forum and watch very closely what will happen at the official High Level Forum, to evaluate if Accra is only about more talks and discourses; of there is finally some political will to a global partnership for development to eradicate poverty and inequality.
Despite the commitments by donor and southern countries to the PD principles, civil society organisations (CSOs) state that the Paris Declaration remains a narrow, unjust and unequal framework for understanding development effectiveness. From the side of women's rights organisations, the position we have been promoting ahead of the upcoming third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, is based on the certainty that there can be no aid effectiveness without development effectiveness and that gender equality, human rights and environment must be recognised as crucial areas for development effectiveness. In this sense, the women's groups understand than the legitimate space for norm-setting on aid and international cooperation issues should be under the United Nations.
Assessing the process towards Accra, one can say that compared to 2005 (the Paris Declaration is gender blind), there have been some improvement in terms of recognising the importance of gender equality and women's rights. Thus, the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) emphasise the central place of poverty reduction and human rights in development policy and the importance of cross-cutting issues such as gender equality, and environmental sustainability. The AAA also recognise the need to improve access to sex-disaggregated data. However, the AAA fails in explicitly recognise the need for coherence with international agreements on human rights, gender equality, environmental sustainability and decent work as frameworks for aid relationships. As well as in including specific indicators to measure these commitments to gender equality, human rights and environmental sustainability at the practical level. Thus, there is no real change of direction.
Broader CSO, including women's rights organisations, are also very concerned with the outcomes of the last AAA version. As stated in the ISG response to the 25th July draft of the AAA "not enough progress has been made in making aid work for poor people", especially from the donors side. The consequences of it could be inaction in improving aid quality and impact, and marginalised groups, poor populations, and women are particularly affected by this lack of comprehensive actions to eradicate poverty and inequalities.
We would like to highlight here too that the debates around "positive conditionalities" hasn't helped much (were even harmful) in moving forward gender equality and women's rights in the Paris framework. Many women's rights groups don't support this approach. Contributing to these debate, one key demand from the Women's Working Group on Financing for Development (FfD) is to remove all policy conditionalities, including conditionalities related to gender equality and other so-called "positive conditionalities" and instead strengthen mutual responsibility, accountability and transparency of donors and southern countries towards their gender equality and human rights commitments at regional and international level. Aid assistance should truly support national owned plans towards implementing these commitments, rather than imposed them.
In few days, over 1000 representatives from multilateral development agencies, bilateral development agencies and southern governments will meet to finally agree their 2008-2010 action plan on aid effectiveness. Its impact in making progress towards sustainable development and the achievement of the MDGs depends now on the real political will of multilateral agencies, donor and southern government representatives to address the obstacles. Thus, the AAA must include more ambitious, concrete and time-bound commitments so that progress can be monitored and donors and governments can be held to account. Women's group will organize the Accra Women's Forum and watch very closely what will happen at the official High Level Forum, to evaluate if Accra is only about more talks and discourses; of there is finally some political will to a global partnership for development to eradicate poverty and inequality.
Organisation
CIVICUS
Source: http://www.civicus.org
