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Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
“Asia wants to protect itself from financial crises”
WTO bans politically motivated trade preferences
Poverty reduction must fail without women’s participation
“The ability to share must be acquired anew”
‘Washington Consensus’ was not meant to be a term for neoliberalism
2/2004 |
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[ PRSPs and gender ]
Poverty reduction must fail without women’s participation
No one disputes that discrimination against women impedes sustainable poverty reduction and social development. Therefore eliminating inequality between the sexes is a trans-sectoral task of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) – at least according to the concept. In practice, however, most of the PRSPs submitted so far do not meet this demand. With a few exceptions (Rwanda, Tanzania), they contain nothing more than a collection of stereotype measures of old-style promotion of women in the health and education sectors.
For African NGOs the reason for that is simple: governments lack the political will to engage themselves for gender equality beyond the benchmarks demanded by the donors in the PRSP guidelines, NGO representatives said at a conference titled ‘Engendering PRSPs in Africa’ which the German Development Ministry (BMZ) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit GTZ, the German organisation for technical cooperation, held in Nairobi at the beginning of December. Whether in Gambia, Malawi or Zambia or in many other countries, representatives of civil society complain that their inputs which address the lives of women and discrimination against them are not incorporated in the papers.
In contrast, government representatives at the conference claimed they were making efforts to take account of gender aspects in PRSPs. However, said a Ugandan MP, they lacked guidance and training on gender issues by the donors. This, of course, is a claim that is hard to understand. For advanced training courses have long been offered in the developing countries, including by African women experts. Rather, the demand for such offers is poor. The conference delegates agreed that the knowledge of all involved in the PRSP process on the drawing up and monitoring of participatory and gender-sensitive public budgets must be widened. The women NGO representatives who complained in Nairobi that so far they had been excluded from negotiations on the financing of PRSPs welcomed initiatives on the monitoring of government revenue and spending policy as a central political instrument to check government actions.
Aster Zaoude, of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), called on the PRSP participants to deal more pragmatically with varying approaches to gender-sensitive poverty reduction. She said it was of secondary importance whether the World Bank promoted equal opportunities for women because that was good for economic growth, or whether the engagement was based on a legal approach for which equal treatment was an end in itself. It is clear, however, the conference concluded, that there is no alternative to bringing the gender issue into PRSPs if poverty reduction is to be effective on a sustainable basis.
Birte Rodenberg
Internet: www.gtz.de/gender-prsp
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