Stefania Bianchi
BRUSSELS, Nov 7 2005 (IPS) – Gender experts will gather here this week for an international conference to examine how changing development policies are affecting efforts to promote gender equality and women s rights.
The conference on Owning Development: Promoting Gender Equality in New Modalities and Partnerships to be held in Brussels Nov. 9-11 will be jointly hosted by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (Unifem) and the European Commission, the European Union (EU) executive.
Gender equality experts from developed and developing countries, government representatives and donor bodies will discuss strategies to ensure that women s rights are central to a new aid architecture .
Unifem will be trying to ensure that that the EU and OECD countries take the lead in women s rights and that new aid flows reach women at country level through country- driven development strategies, Unifem executive director Noeleen Heyzer told IPS. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a grouping of 30 industrialised countries.
In recent years there has been a considerable reshaping of the structures and financing of development cooperation. Aid allocation is increasingly driven by the partnership between donor and recipient countries, and ownership by the recipients of aid.
Unifem says such shifts in development have raised important questions about aid implementation and the accountability of development actors, while presenting new opportunities to advance the gender equality and poverty eradication agenda.
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But Unifem warns that gender equality has not been addressed explicitly and that such opportunities could be lost unless serious efforts are undertaken to ensure that gender equality imperatives are central to the new aid architecture.
Heyzer says her address at the conference will highlight the progress made so far on women s rights since the fourth world summit in Beijing in 1995, and will stress that it has been too slow.
HIV/AIDS has become younger, poverty now has a woman s face, the income gap between men and women is widening, she said. We currently have good policies and strategies but they are not being implemented properly because there is a lack of accountability and responsibility.
In a series of workshops, delegates will also raise specific questions about what effect such changes have on gender equality and women s rights, and what partnerships are needed to spur progress to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These are a set of eight goals agreed by world leaders in 2000. The third of these goals is to promote gender equality and to empower women.
The conference follows three important events held this year a review in Beijing to assess what UN member states have done in the past 10 years to ensure equal rights for women, a review of aid effectiveness in March in Paris, and the UN summit in New York in September to review progress towards the MDGs.
We believe that gender inequality is greatest in the countries that the European Commission is trying to help with its development corporation, but not enough attention has been paid to gender equality so far this year, Lieve Fransen, head of the human and social development unit in the European Commission s development directorate-general told IPS.
We specifically planned this event after the Beijing summit so that its focus will not be lost in text and politics, she added.
Fransen says the Commission will be hoping to achieve a more appropriate strategy for gender equality at the meeting, and is concerned that the issue is not very visible in the EU development policy statement announced in July. She hopes it will be given a stronger mandate at this conference.
Gender equality is connected to rights, and development cannot be achieved if half of the population, namely women, are in poverty, she said.
Fransen says she will pay particular attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic as an example of how gender equality has been neglected. HIV has a young African woman s face that only has one partner. This is a glaring effect of gender inequality.