Arthur Okemba

While civil society organisations welcomed the new order as one that would enhance accountability and ensure result-based approaches in the use of donor money, they had serious reservations with how gender issues would be addressed.
In 2005, the world witnessed a milestone as donors, governments and other development partners said it was not business as usual as they adopted the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

The Declaration, which is guided by five principles — Harmonisation, Management for Results, Ownership, Alignment, and Mutual Accountability — was designed to change how Aid is disbursed and used by recipient governments.

It was a shift from project funding within certain ministries to a more elaborate budget support and sector wide support systems.

While the civil society organisations welcomed the new order as one that would enhance accountability and ensure result-based approaches in the use of donor money, they had serious reservations with how gender issues would be addressed in the new funding and expenditure mechanism.

At the ongoing 3rd High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, Ghana, equality advocates have lamented the failure to give emphasis to gender issues in the Paris Declaration.

Already, women from 15 West African countries and Mauritania, have sent warning to donors and their partner African governments that Aid cannot be effective when it does not lead to sustainable development. They insist that Aid can only be effective if it acknowledges centrality of human rights, gender equality and women’s empowerment as well as social justice and environmental sustainability.

“We regret that the Paris Declaration has not taken into account human rights, gender equality and women’s empowerment leading to an absence of gender indicators to measure progress in line with international instruments,” says the West African women in their statement released in Lome, Togo in June, 2008.

A gender advocate from Kenya, Ms Joy Lumbaysio, says: “We cannot leave it to government officials to decide how gender will be tackled in these new funding mechanisms.” She reiterates: “There is need to put in place water tight measures and systems that ensure gender issues are catered for.”

Her fears are informed by the fact that most African governments have been known to put to the periphery gender issues in the development plans and policies, only to act on them on the whims of individuals or on ad hoc basis.

Since 2005 when this shift started taking shape, several gender advocates, with UNIFEM taking the lead role, have pushed for gender equality within the new aid modalities.
New innovative mechanisms that ensure gender issues are given priority and receive visibility as well as adequate funding have been put in place in a few African countries.
In others, interventions in this direction are afoot, but moving painfully slow. Test cases on how to give visibility and priority to gender issues have been going in Zambia, Kenya, Senegal, Ghana and Burundi.

Encouraging findings showing how effective some strategies can be in ensuring gender equality in the new funding modalities that are already emerging from these countries.
Recognising gender as a distinct sector whose funds enjoy a budgetary vote in parliament is already happening in Zambia.

In this country, gender is a sector just like health or education and is treated as such in budgetary allocations. This approach has helped tackle gender priority issues in a more focused way.

The other strategy, which has worked perfectly well is the use of basket funds that focus exclusively on specific gender issues. This financing model that addresses gender equality issues has been shown to work during the Gender and Governance Programme in Kenya. This programme was implemented using a basket fund supported by various donors.

The Programme is designed to address women’s participation in decision-making processes as well as the achievement of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially Goal 3.

This programme was born out of the Kenya Joint Assistance Strategy (KJAS) 2008-2012, which provides a framework for donor support to national development planning as well as gender equality.

But besides coming up with these specific mechanisms, gender advocates want gender issues to be mainstreamed in all sectors using a participatory approach. This means that women should be involved in the planning, budgetary decisions, implementation as well as monitoring and evaluation processes around gender programmes.

Past experience also indicate that different strategies need to be used when dealing with gender issues in stable democracies and in conflict situations.

Work in Burundi, for instance, shows that for a country undergoing reconstruction and reintegration, the first step to protect women’s rights is to establish institutional mechanisms and commitments to gender equality by involving women at every stage of these processes.

In Senegal, the decision to include Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper Monitoring and Evaluation Unit within the Ministry of Finance in scrutinising the gender-responsive budget has resulted in better integration of gender issues in the strategy paper.

In Ghana, a Gender Equality Sector Team working group established in 2004 exists to ensure that gender issues are mainstreamed in national policies as well as provided with adequate funding within the New Aid Modalities.

This group is also supporting Ministry of Women‘s and Children’s Affairs to implement its own programmes and to boost its capacity to support gender mainstreaming in various sectors of government.

In crisis hit Zimbabwe, a Gender Scoping Study to profile women’s priority needs, identify key actors, and institutions to address them, and provide a roadmap for strategic and comprehensive support to gender issues has been done.

One main outcome of this process is the establishment of a Basket Fund managed by UNIFEM. With over one million Euros from the European Union and £50,000 from DfID, the Fund became operational in August, 2008.

However, as countries make these encouraging steps, there are numerous obstacles that stand in the way to realising gender equality.

In many of the African countries, citizens, particularly women, are yet to participate fully and effectively in decision-making processes around how donor funds are allocated, utilised, monitored and evaluated. So far, only few government officials are participating, which gender advocates argue does not reflect the full participation and ownership of women and other citizens as envisaged in the Paris Declaration.

Similarly, while gender is recognised as a sector in countries like Zambia, inadequate funding remains a huge problem. Sometimes this funding is subject to reductions instead of being increased. In the Zambian case, funds allocated to gender equality sector reduced from $1,000,000 to $650,000.

In Kenya, there has been an outcry that the Ministry of Gender and Children Affairs, Gender Commission, and other gender focal points within line ministries are not receiving as much adequate funding and attention as they deserve.

The same story is heard in Ghana where the Ministry of Women’s and Children’s Affairs is said to be getting inadequate funding, complicating its ability to execute its mandate.

This means even with these mechanisms in place, it is not an assurance that gender issues are being given adequate attention, particularly in resource allocation and involving women in decision-making processes on matters that touch on their wellbeing.

Gender advocates will have to work extra hard and come up with innovative mechanisms to ensure gender equality initiatives are not only well funded, but that such funding is assured and consistent.

The Accra Agenda for Action provides the apt opportunity and space to do just that. AWCFS