Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

132 Chapter 11
A gender needs
assessment can
enable countries
to identify
constraints
and plan
systematically
to remove them
estimates are a powerful advocacy tool for women’s groups and other
civil society organizations in national-level dialogue on specific actions
needed to achieve gender equality. Gender-sensitive policies and laws
often fail to be implemented because of lack of information and dialogue
on the resources needed to implement them. A comprehensive and
transparent assessment of the necessary resources will make national
dialogue possible.
• Improving understanding of absorptive capacity and of how lowincome
countries can increase this capacity. Limited human resources,
managerial skills, monitoring and evaluation systems, and infrastructure
may constrain a country’s ability to implement gender plans. These
constraints can be substantially relaxed through investments in human
resources, management systems, administrative capacity, and infrastructure.
A gender needs assessment can enable countries to identify
such constraints and plan systematically to remove them.
Detailed investment models derived from a Millennium Development
Goals needs assessment provide clear targets that can form the basis for a monitoring
and accountability framework for tracking country progress toward the
gender Goal.
Needs assessment methodology and caveats
The UN Millennium Project has developed a detailed methodology for quantifying
the human, financial, and infrastructure resources needed to meet
the Millennium Development Goals (box 11.1). In collaboration with the
UN Millennium Project Secretariat, Task Force 3 on Education and Gender
Equality adapted this general needs assessment methodology for estimating
the financing requirements for the gender-related interventions recommended
in this report.
There are several important caveats about this methodology. First, the
needs assessment includes only some of the actions necessary to meet the Goal
of gender equality and empowerment of women. Adequate resources alone will
not achieve gender equality. Most strategies require a mix of investments and
changes in legislation, political and administrative rules, social attitudes, and
norms. The needs assessment, therefore, should be seen as a minimal but necessary
set of actions to meet the Goal of gender equality.
Second, a gender needs assessment is possible only at the country level
and meaningful only as part of a national poverty reduction strategy in which
all stakeholders participate. The interventions to be costed need to be locally
identified, based on nationally determined targets.
Third, gender needs assessments should be carried out in conjunction
with similar exercises for related areas such as education, health, transport
and energy infrastructure, water and sanitation, agriculture, nutrition, urban
development, and environment. Such simultaneous estimation of needs is