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Failing women, sustaining poverty: gender in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers
Report for the UK Gender and Development Network
Authors:
A. Whitehead ; Christian Aid
Publisher:
Christian Aid, 2003
More than half the poor citizens of heavily indebted developing countries are women. Since 1999, the international financial institutions have required these countries to formulate nationally owned participatory poverty-reduction strategies, in the form of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), as a condition of receiving concessional lending and debt relief under the enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative.
This report, produced by Christian Aid, explores how the PRSPs of four countries deal with gender issues. It examines the form that gender issues take in the PRSPs of Tanzania, Bolivia, Malawi and Yemen, why they take this form, and how this is linked to the unique design of each PRSP process. It finds that gender issues appear in a fragmented and arbitrary way in the body of the PRSPs dealing with policy priorities and budget commitments. Some ‘women in development’ issues are raised, especially in the sections on health and education, but gender is not integrated, or mainstreamed. [adapted from author]
