| |
►Governance
►Gender
Mainstreaming
►Gender
Equality
►Women
Empowerment
Governance
Governance is the exercise of
political, economic and
administrative authority to
manage a nation's affairs. It is
the complex mechanisms,
processes, relationships and
institutions through which
citizens and groups articulate
their interests, exercise their
rights and obligations and
mediate their differences.
Governance encompasses every
institutions and organization in
the society, from the family to
the state and embraces all
methods - good and bad - that
societies use to distribute
power and manage public
resources and problems. Good
governance is therefore a subset
of governance, wherein public
resources and problems are
managed effectively, efficiently
and in response to critical
needs of society. Effective
democratic forms of governance
rely on public participation,
accountability and transparency
More on Governance
Gender Mainstreaming
“Mainstreaming gender
perspective is the process of
assessing the implications for
women and men of any planned
action, including legislation,
policies or programs, in all
areas and at all levels. It is a
strategy for making women's as
well as men's concerns and
experiences an integral
dimension of the design,
implementation, monitoring and
evaluation of policies and
programs in all political,
economic and societal spheres so
that women and men benefit
equally and inequality is not
perpetuated. The ultimate goal
is to achieve gender equality.
Gender mainstreaming involves
bringing the contribution,
perspectives and priorities of
both women and men to the centre
of attention in the development
arena in order to inform the
design, implementation and
outcomes of policies and
programs. It is a critical
strategy not only in the pursuit
of gender equality – a
development goal in its own
right – but also in the
achievement of other development
goals, including economic ones.
Indeed, overlooking relevant
gender factors in macroeconomic
policies and institutions can
undermine the successful outcome
of those very same policies and
institutions”.
Gender awareness is the ability
to view society from the
perspective of gender roles and
how this has affected women’s
needs in comparison to the needs
of men. Gender sensitivity is
translating this awareness into
action in the design of
development policies, programs
and budgets.
Gender Mainstreaming based on
UNIFEM, Focusing on Women -
UNIFEM's experience in
mainstreaming, 1993
“Mainstreaming” is a
process rather than a goal that
consists in bringing what can be
seen as marginal into the core
business and main decision
making process of an
organization.
Efforts to integrate gender
concerns into existing
institutions of the mainstream
have little value for their own
sake. A gender perspective is
being mainstreamed to achieve
gender equality and improve the
relevance and effectiveness of
development agendas as a whole,
for the benefit of all women and
men.
The term “mainstreaming” emerged
in the early 1980s when in the
midst of the United Nations
Decade for Women, the
international women’s movement
was concerned that the women
specific programme strategies
had not achieved significant
results. Women units and
national machineries established
during this period had too often
been understaffed and
marginalized from real
decision-making and policy
formulation within UN entities
and governments.
Furthermore, the little
resources that were earmarked
for “women targeted” projects
resulted in small, side-lined
activities that reinforced the
marginalization of women in
development processes. The women
who witnessed these trends began
to look for alternative
strategies to move women’s
issues out of the periphery and
into the “mainstream” of
development decision making. At
this time “mainstreaming” had a
number of different meanings and
use. For some, it meant
including women in development
planning. For others, it implied
ensuring that institutional
budgets included significant
resources for “women
activities”. Around such various
understandings of
“mainstreaming” there were
intense debates about the
advantages and disadvantages of
“women targeted activities”
versus integrated programming
for and with women.
Seven years after the Beijing
Fourth World Conference on
Women, the international
development community has come
to a common use of the term.
“Mainstreaming” now most
generally refers to a
comprehensive strategy that
involves both women-oriented
programming and the integration
of women/gender issues into
overall existing programmes,
throughout the programme cycle
Gender Equality
The
term gender equality has been
defined in a variety of ways in
the context of development,
which means gender equality in
terms of equality under the law,
equality of opportunity
(including equality
of rewards for work and equality
in access to human capital and
other productive resources that
enable opportunity), and
equality of voice (the ability
to influence and contribute to
the development process). It
stops short of defining gender
equality as equality of outcomes
for two reasons. First,
different cultures and societies
can follow different paths in
their pursuit of gender
equality. Second, equality
implies that women and men are
free to choose different (or
similar) roles and different (or
similar) outcomes in accordance
with their preferences and
goals.
Gender inequalities exert high
human costs and constrain the
development of countries. These
consequences provide a
compelling case for public and
private action to promote gender
equality. The state has a
critical role in improving the
well-being of both women and men
and, by so doing, in capturing
the substantial social benefits
associated with improving the
absolute and relative status of
women and girls. Public action
is particularly important,
because social and legal
institutions that perpetuate and
are responsible for gender
inequalities are extremely
difficult, if not impossible,
for individuals alone to change.
Market failures, too, mean
insufficient information about
women's productivity in the
labor market (because they spend
a greater part of their work
hours in non-market activities
or because labor markets are
absent or undeveloped) and are
clear obstacles.
Improving the effectiveness of
societal institutions and
achieving economic growth are
widely accepted as key elements
of any long term development
strategy. However successful
implementation of this strategy
does not guarantee gender
equality. To promote gender
equality, policies for
institutional change and
economic development need to
consider and address prevailing
gender inequalities in rights,
resources, and voice. And active
policies and programs are needed
to redress longstanding
disparities between women and
men. The evidence argues for a
three-part strategy for
promoting gender equality (Rights,
Resources and Voice).
Women Empowerment
Defined as women's level of
control in decision making
positions, for control over the
allocation of resources, the
determination of policy,
regulations and laws. At the
level of the society or the
nation, women's empowerment is
here measured in terms of the
level of women's representation
in higher level decision making
positions in public
institutions.
This is a rather rough measure
of women's empowerment: firstly
it is concerned only with
national level decision making,
and secondly it overlooks the
problem that some women may
occupy public office without
actually exercising power
('token women'). By the same
token it overlooks the
likelihood that some women are
actually in background positions
which might actually be very
important in determining public
policy. These limitations are
typical of the price paid by
using simple 'surface'
quantitative indicators of
gender gaps, without looking
more deeply into the underlying
structure.
We here also distinguish between
women's empowerment and women's
self-reliance, where the latter
may be defined in terms of the
individual woman's ability to
gain access to resources, and to
take decisions affecting her own
personal life. (This is often -
but unhelpfully – termed
'empowerment' or 'personal
empowerment'. It is here given
the term 'self-reliance' so that
it clearly is distinguished from
'empowerment' as defined above).
The level of women's
self-reliance, relative to men,
may be measured by such
indicators as levels of literacy
and education, skills training,
ownership of land and capital,
and access to credit.
Women's level of self-reliance
is a measure of the extent to
which women are in a position to
maximise their well-being, and
control over their lives, within
the existing structure of gender
inequality. By comparison,
women's level of collective
empowerment is a measure of the
extent to which women occupy
higher levels of decision making
in society, so that they are in
a position to challenge and
change present structures of
gender inequality.
The common failure to
distinguish between empowerment
and self-reliance, and the
consequent inter-changeable use
of these terms, leads to a
failure to distinguish between
two quite different forms of
women's advancement.
|
