What's New
DAC guiding principles for aid effectiveness, gender equality and women's empowerment
Aid effectiveness: working for women's empowerment and gender equality
Authors:
Publisher:
The Paris Declaration, OECD-DAC, 2009
This paper states that recent reforms of aid delivery, most notably the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), have provided new opportunities and mechanisms to translate donor and government commitments into improved practice, results and impacts. However, the authors determine that achieving internationally agreed development goals will not be possible without progress on gender equality and women’s empowerment. At the same time, the research asserts that implementing the Paris Declaration’s overarching partnership commitments is a powerful way of accelerating progress on Millennium Development Goal 3: gender equality and women’s empowerment.
The Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action (2008) provide the frameworks and good practice principles for fostering gender equality as a priority development issue. These DAC Guiding Principles for Aid Effectiveness, Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment suggest approaches and entry points for policy advisors and programme managers in both donor and partner countries to increase the prospects for achieving development results and impacts through work on gender equality and women’s empowerment.
Recommendations, in line with the Paris Declaration principles, include:
- Ownership - working with partner country parliaments, ministries (including planning, finance and women’s ministries), local government, NGOs and the private sector to ensure that women’s voices are heard in the development of Poverty Reduction Strategies and other medium-term plans
- Alignment - drawing on existing gender expertise in partner countries (or regions) and developing local capacity when using external gender expertise
- Harmonisation - sharing, drawing on and facilitating access to other donors’ gender equality expertise at country level to ensure the best possible division of labour amongst donors
- Managing for results - sex-disaggregated data is collected, analysed, used and disseminated; and there are indicators for gender equality and women’s empowerment in monitoring systems
- Mutual accountability - Support to central and local government institutions to strengthen their own accountability to all citizens and users of their services
