States?
o Is it of high priority to both men and women in member States?
o What is currently happening in this area that affects gender equality?
o What is the status of women as far as the chosen theme is concerned?
o Will the methodology for analysis take into account gender differences?
o Is there gender-disaggregated data to be used in carrying out the analysis?
o Will gender stakeholders in the countries represented in the report be contacted for their
inputs?
o What is the likely impact on gender equality of the adoption of the recommendations made in the ERA by member States?
o Will the method for data collection involve as many women as men - for example, if interviews are to be conducted, how many men and women will be interviewed? Will the opinions of both men and women be considered?
o Are gender considerations taken into account when appointing consultants and other experts to work on the ERA? Do their terms of reference specify the need for gender
expertise?
o Who are the major users of the ERA from a gender perspective?
o Is the ACGD invited to contribute to the ERA?
o Does the ERA make use of gender-based documents within the Commission, e.g. the GDI and the AWR?
o What gender tools are available to you for gender mainstreaming into the ERA?
o What are the major challenges for gender mainstreaming into the ERA?
o In mainstreaming gender into the ERA, is the language gender sensitive?
o Are efforts made to obtain and to use data on the actual position of women and men on the relationships between the sexes?
o Does the ERA team understand a gender-responsive framework for policy analysis and policy advocacy from a gender perspective, a data perspective and an economics
perspective?
o Is there gender balance in the external review team?
o Do policy recommendations made in the ERA take into account different ways in which such policies impact differently on men and women?
o How is the impact of the ERA on gender development measured/
5.2 Mainstreaming gender in ECA's work on Governance
What are the issues? What are the goals? A gendered analysis of governance immediately highlights the issue of participation and representation. It is often presumed that there is
"commonality of interest" between men and women, as well as their needs and perspectives.
This has often been used to legitimize an overwhelming presence of men in formal governance structures at the national level -i.e. parliament and government (or Cabinet of Ministers).
However, a gender analysis of political processes and policies reveals that men and women do
not always share the same needs and perspectives, and that it is thus critical that women be represented as well, so that their interests - as half of the population - are adequately addressed.
Thus once the "commonality of interests" is challenged, a mandate emerges for more balanced participation of men and women, to ensure that both genders participate in the decisions and actions that affect them. However, the system barriers that often keep women out of major public governance structures are profound, and must be addressed before any serious progress
can be made.
Barriers to female participation in Governance Structures
1. General attitudes and cultures in society, which construe men as the only real political actors, tend to legitimate men and their actions, while disqualifying women. In the same sense, women in politics are often more closely scrutinized and criticized than 2. men.The assumption of the commonality of interests between men and women often negates the need to represent women as a social group. While women are by no means a coherent, internally identical group, they do share some common needs and interests,
which require representation.
3. The lack of a written and citable political commitment to social and gender equality and justice (i.e. National Plan of Action or other policy document) makes it difficult to hold
governance structures accountable for low female participation.
4. Women can be discouraged and intimidated by the use of masculine terminology in politics and governance, either under the flawed assumption that men are the only legitimate actors here, or that masculine terminology can also include and represent women - which it does not.
5. A lack of media representation of women's political voices, views, demands, and leadership, means that other women lack a model with which they can identify and find
legitimacy for their own views.
6. The masculine culture of politics, including the 'old boys network' of patronage and connections and the pervasiveness of the after-hours get-togethers (e.g. on the basketball court, in the sauna) to reach agreements on political questions keeps women out of many informal yet integral aspects of decision-making.
7. The unequal division of family responsibilities, including household management and childcare, places women at a disadvantage in terms of time needed to be active in politics. Similarly, limited social services inhibit women's access to "disposable time".
8. Women's lower wages and limited entitlements to social benefits, alongside prevalent social expectations that women spend income on their families, inhibits or prevents expenditure on an uncertain political career.
9. Public and private forms of violence exercised by men against women curbs and controls women's self-determination and risk-taking behavior.
Source: Ashworth: Gendered governance: An Agenda for Change p. 11.
The Development Policy and Management Division (DPMD) whose overall aim is to strengthen development management through promoting measures to enhance public sector management, facilitating private sector competitiveness, and strengthening civil society's participation in development and good governance. DPMD has three main programme areas: public sector management, private sector management and civil society management. The Division analyses and prepares policy and strategy documents for improving administrative governance, private sector competitiveness and civil society's participation in the development process. This is done
through:
• High levels of intervention and partnerships
• Building information network through databases
• Organizing round tables for experience an information sharing and dissemination
• Providing capacity building support;
• Technical and advisory services
All these programme areas lend themselves very well to gender mainstreaming since the current and sometimes dynamic developments in these areas involve and improve the lives of both men and women. One of the major cornerstones of good governance is the participation of as many people and representative groups as possible. A gender approach is necessary for particular attention being paid to the needs, concerns, perspectives and constraints of both men and women.
The Division is addressing issues that are often not seen in terms of their gender implications, but rather as neutral subjects. Matters such as privatization, public sector reforms, civil society participation etc. are often presented as gender neutral and yet their gender differential impacts have implications for sustainable development.
How can these be gender-mainstreamed?
ECA advocates policies and build capacity for member States to implement these policies. In its advocacy role, the goal of mainstreaming a gender perspective into issues of governance and participation at the national level is two-fold:
• To ensure balanced participation between men and women in national governance, which includes removal of structural and systematic barriers to women's participation;
• To ensure that gender issues are integrated into decision-making, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of governance initiatives.
DPMD has a central role to play in system-wide and systematic gender mainstreaming. Focus should be on issues such as:
• Who has the capacity to participate in privatization programmes and schemes?
• What is the availability and flow of gender disaggregated data?
• Who are involved in and affected by public sector and private sector reforms?
• What gender dynamics at household and community level result from such reforms?
• Is and can the participation of civil society be gender neutral?
• What gender perspectives are at play in the discourse of the Regional Forums on Governance?
5.3 Mainstreaming gender in the work on information for development
By the early 1990's, only 9 women had won the Nobel Peace Prize in science subjects, compared to over 300 men. Similarly, The American National Academy of Sciences had 1750 living members, only 70 of whom were female. Data in developing countries points to an even higher degree of exclusion ofwomen(E. Rathgeber. "Schooling for What?" Missing Links)
In an increasingly globalized world, many experts have highlighted the revolutionary potential of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). The communications revolution has been liken by some to the industrial revolution. Given this significance, it seems obvious that those shut out of these new developments have much to lose. Unfortunately, figures from around the world show alarming gender gaps in the use of the interne. However, this is more than a simple question of attaining gender balcne amongst users of new ICTs. These technologies are not an end in themselves, but rather an important tool and a key that can unlock many doors, for example, to parts of the labour market, to new information, to education, to the ability to connect and communicate with the entire world. Policy makers everywhere and development efforts should thus ensure that this tool id made equally available to both men and
women.
The goals pertaining to the work on information for development from a gender perspective are:
• Provision of equal opportunities for men and women to acquire and use skills associated with ICT
• Development of policies that ensure that social justice, including gender equality, govern the development of ICT sectors or sub-programme.
Gender concerns are one dimension of the new trends in mainstream development, which creates new demands for development information. The emerging focus on sustainable development, on a human well -being and rights-based approach, the new results-oriented development policy and programme planning, monitoring and evaluation frameworks are generating new data and information needs. These are particularly in the form of disaggregated sets of indicators.
New information and new ways of producing information: the availability of gender -disaggregated data in new and existing data systems is crucial for mainstreaming gender sectoral and disciplinary areas, for empirical analysis. At macro-level, the need is for aggregation of data on non-magnetized economic activity. A gender mainstreaming approach is outcome-oriented, stressing the need to be transparent and explicitly account for development outcomes for women and men, for different groups and categories of people.
ECA's work in the area of information for development is carried out by the Development Information Services Division. It aims at "enhancing national capacities for the utilization of information and communication technologies and the establishment, networking and use of statistical, bibliographic, referral and spatial databases as decision support tools for socio-economic development.
The scope for making advances in generation of development information is large within DISD.
The Division has three components;
• Statistics
• Referral and bibliographic databases and
• Spatial databases
Each of these three areas is important for different aspects of gender mainstreaming:
1. Statistics for promoting and supporting statistical development in gender-disaggregated data; for generating the missing data, such as on unpaid reproductive labor, and aggregating them into the system of national accounts.
2. Referral and bibliographic databases for facilitating access to and circulation of gender
information.
3. Spatial databases as tools for gender analysis, which is essentially contextual and holistic, which require new ways of relating -through visualization - different types of data.
Possible interventions and entry points for gender mainstreaming in both the ECA and in major
areas of work include:
• Gender impact assessment of ICT policies - a review of policy governing the ICT programme could identify: any barriers to achieving gender equality in the ICT secto; and potential entry points for enhancing gender equality.
• Increasing access - evidence of large gender gaps in male and female internet use may manifest hidden discrimination against women or men due to cost of services, location and availability of free or discounted internet access.
• Awareness campaigns - One major problem with new ICTs is the enormous psychological barrier they represent to many people, particularly among women. ICT policies should therefore be sure to include information campaigns that are aimed at demystifying these technologies for audiences who are reluctant to embrace them.
• Promoting education and training opportunities - training and education programmes should be offered that are geared specifically towards staff who have so far been unable
to embrace ICTs.
• More gender-aware research on ICTs - These will reveal more about gender dimensions of ICTs, and the results of such research should feed back into policies that help redress
adverse gender effects.
5.4 Gender Mainstreaming in the Trade, Investment and Regional Integration
ECA has intensified its activities and programmes towards enhancing African economic integration and increasing the continent's participation in, and benefits from global trade. The Commission undertakes in-depth policy and analytical studies on trade related issues with the aim of highlighting opportunities and challenges at the regional and global levels. The ECA has also developed a comprehensive Trade-Related Capacity Building, Research and Training Programme for Africa, aimed at training 300 trade negotiators in the next two years negotiators through the Institute for Development Economics and Planning (IDEP) in Dakar. Other areas of focus are Private Investment Promotion; Transportation Infrastructure, and the African Capital
Markets development.
All these activities provide a wide scope and excellent opportunity for mainstreaming gender.
It is well acknowledged that trade, investment and regional integration can have differential impact on gender. Women are often marginalized and left behind due to their roles of production within the family, the community, and the informal market. In advocating for policies to address these problems, we have to make sure they work for women. The dynamics between women's location in and identification with social production, and critical gender gaps regarding access and ownership of resources are impacted by changes in trade policy and trade agreements. What does this mean for women's and men's daily survival and long-term strategic advancement? What then are the issues relating to Trade liberalization from a gender perspective - and which should bear upon ECA's work?
Trade policymaking needs to be approached from a gender perspective in a number of contexts:
• Shifting the burden of social reproduction: Impact of trade on social reproduction.
The work of social reproduction, which includes the care of the human family and the building of communities, is primarily left to women. It is invisible, undervalued, uncounted, and taken for granted. There is little recognition that the work of social reproduction is the foundation for all other sectors of society. Essential public services contribute to the success of social reproduction and ease the burdens of women - and release them to other economic opportunities.
Tariffs and licensing fees are usually abolished or reduced when free trade is introduced. This may decrease government revenue, forcing governments to increase taxes, or to cut down on social. This means that the social burden is most often shifted to women in the face of such cut backs (to care for children, to care for the sick and elderly - either in addition to or at the expense of paid employment). This can be a major setback for gender equality.
• Protection of the domestic labor force: The national legislation and policy that protect social and economic rights of the domestic labor force may be challenged by international trade agreements. The weakening of such legal instruments in export processing zones may affect women and men differently. This is because there is often a high degree of gender segregation within the labor force, and EPZs often rely heavily on cheap female labor.
• 'Fair Trade" or Social Responsibilities of States engaging in trade relations with other countries: Some trade processes rely on exploitation of cheap labor from least-developed countries. This is often female labor. Women are often kept trapped in EPZs by such practices -in marg-inal occupation, limit-ing their opportunities to enhance their skills and move on to better quality employment. Additionally, trade liberalization may weaken worker's bargaining power over wages and benefits.
• Benefits of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI): Although trade liberalization may increase foreign direct investment thus bringing benefits in terms of modernization of working practices and new technologies, these benefits are not guaranteed, nor are they equally distributed between men and women. Thus such advances can increase gender inequality.
• Impact on women's work. Existing gender inequalities and male bias may adversely affect the outcome of trade policies in terms of promoting development. Women and women operate