• Gender and the MDGs

Gender and the MDGs

UNIFEM’s biennial flagship report argues that realising women’s rights and achieving the Millennium Development Goals depends on strengthening accountability for commitments to women and gender equality. Progress 2008/2009 demonstrates that for women’s rights to translate into substantive improvements in their lives, and for gender equality to be realised in practice, women must be able to fully participate in public decision-making at all levels and hold those responsible to account when their rights are infringed or their needs ignored.

Published at the half-way point to the 2015 deadline for achieving the MDGs, the report presents the case that women’s empowerment and gender equality are drivers for reducing poverty, building food security, reducing maternal mortality, safeguarding the environment, and enhancing the effectiveness of aid.

Key findings and recommendations include:

• there are more women in government than ever before. Even though in the last decade the number of women parliamentarians at the national level has increased by 8% to a global average of 18.4%, developing countries will still not reach the “parity zone” of 40-60% until 2045. Quotas or other special measures are effective in ensuring progress: women hold an average of 19.3%t of parliamentary seats in countries that applied some form of electoral quota, compared to 14.7% in countries with no quotas
  
• service delivery that responds to women’s needs is the litmus test of government accountability. In sub-Saharan Africa women spend 40 billion hours each year collecting water – the equivalent of a year’s worth of labour by the entire workforce of France Globally, maternal mortality is going down at a rate of just 0.4% a year – compared to the 5.5% needed to meet MDG 5. Health services are often too distant and too costly to access, agricultural services are geared towards male farmers, and government services are sometimes based on the assumption that the applicant is an employed, literate or propertied man
  
• women experience corruption differently from men. Sexual extortion for instance is an unrecognized ‘bribe’ women are asked to pay. Women around the world also tend to perceive higher levels of corruption than men in public institutions. In developed countries, for example, 30% more women than men perceive high levels of corruption in the education system
  
• women are especially vulnerable to shifting patterns in global markets in the absence of protective measures. The recent food crisis, for example, has had a severe effect on women, who not only assume primary responsibility for feeding their families but also contribute as much as 60%-80% of agricultural labour in sub-Saharan Africa and 50% in Asia. Women’s employment is also shaped by global trends. For instance, the average rate of emigration among women with tertiary education is higher that men’s across all regions, except North America. This ‘brain drain’ is likely to have a negative impact on women’s social and economic leadership in developing countries
  
• improving women’s access to justice requires gender-based reforms in law enforcement and informal justice institutions. Evidence from Liberia suggests that the presence of an all-female police contingent sent by the government of India as part of the peacekeeping force is encouraging women to engage with the police, both by registering their complaints and joining the Liberia police service. Similar examples can be found in other post-conflict countries, such as Timor-Leste and Kosovo. With respect to informal justice systems, progress has been extremely slow, as most such systems are often exempt from the application of human rights and gender equality standards
  
• multilateral aid and security institutions can do much more to meet their own commitments and standards on gender equality. To date, no agreed system-wide tracking mechanism exists within multilateral institutions, such as the United Nations and the International Financial Institutions, to assess the amount of aid allocated to gender equality or women’s empowerment. Within the OECD there is a Gender Equality Marker (GEM) to track allocations, but less than half of the funds eligible for ‘screening’ use this marker. Since the introduction of the GEM, amounts marked for gender have almost tripled in absolute terms – from US$ 2.5 billion in 2002 to US$ 7.2 billion in 2006 – but remain small as a percentage of the total.
  

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