Executive summary
The Experts Meeting on Gender Mainstreaming of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in selected African Countries opened in Pretoria, South Africa on Monday, 24 March 2003. The meeting, co-hosted by UNDP/Southern Africa SURF and UNIFEM Regional Office for Southern Africa, brought together 40 participants drawn from the Governments of Botswana, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, civil society organizations, including the Southern African Regional Poverty Network (SARPN), Gender Action and FOWODE, the SADC Gender Unit, UN agencies (UNDP, UNIFEM and UNECA), World Bank, UNDP SURF Kathmandu, and donor agencies (CIDA, DFID and GTZ).
The objective of the meeting was to provide a forum for concrete and action-oriented dialogue on the important challenge of mainstreaming gender into national poverty reduction strategies and capacity development. The meeting provided an opportunity for sharing experiences, good practices and lessons learned, identifying capacity building needs through Experts' presentations, plenary sessions and small group discussions. This initiative was undertaken within the framework of follow-up activities to the implementation of the Beijing Platform of Action, which provides a comprehensive framework for gender equality and the empowerment of women, with particular reference to poverty reduction.
Participants worked to develop and strengthen the operationalisation tools for engendering PRSPs and discussed how best to link these to overall planning, with a view to improving priority gender related interventions. Participants also discussed the status of gender responsive budgeting in the region, with a particular focus on the extent to which this process has been integrated into such key planning tools as the PRSPs. Participants also looked at the resource implications of gender related interventions within the context of Medium Term Expenditure Frameworks and the PRSPs and discussed ways to develop sex-disaggregated monitoring and evaluation indicators to assess outcomes and impacts of policies and interventions.
The outcome of the Experts' Meeting, as reflected in the recommendations, centred around five core themes: seeking conceptual clarity around poverty and gender that is both academically rigorous and action-oriented; calling for political commitment and policy coherence around gender and development; creating institutional knowledge and frameworks for gender and poverty reduction; enhancing human capacity development and resource sharing; and refining tools and methodologies for the implementation of gender mainstreaming at all levels of policy making.
The key recommendations of the Workshop are highlighted at the beginning of this Report. [View report  - 168Kb ~ 1 min (43 pages)]
|
Related documents
