Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

152 Chapter 12
Poverty
reduction
strategies in
low-income
countries are
the mechanism
for influencing
development
policies and
plans
the pressure of an independent women’s movement forced change within
government.
Institutional structures and processes are being transformed through constitutional
change, legal reform, and the formation of new governmental organizations.
Cambodia, Rwanda, and South Africa have all made commitments
to gender equality a key component of their constitutions. All four countries
have implemented major legal and legislative reforms to advance equality
between women and men. And in all four countries a national women’s
machinery has been put in place, supported by political leaders, with strong
mandates for achieving gender equality. South Africa also established a Gender
Equality Commission, which serves as a monitoring mechanism and reports
to the president’s office.
It is difficult to establish whether adequate technical resources exist in these
countries for implementing their commitments to gender equality. However, as
the four case studies show, the multilayered responses (legislative, policy, and
project) to gender inequality suggest that technical capacity is not lacking.
Similarly, it is hard to know whether the gender equality machinery has
adequate financial resources to do its work, an area where information is sorely
lacking. The limited information from Cambodia suggests that gender equality
is underresourced relative to the other cross-sectoral ministry. Yet, the advent
of gender-budget initiatives, especially in Chile, Rwanda, and South Africa
holds the promise of such information becoming available and useful to gender
equality advocates within and outside government.
Finally, in terms of monitoring and accountability, each country has women’s
movements that can hold governments to their promises. Gender budget
initiatives are an important monitoring and accountability mechanism. Each
country is a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women, but it is not clear whether the associated monitoring
mechanism truly serves to hold governments accountable for bringing
about the changes required to meet the convention’s provisions. 4
Gender mainstreaming in MDG-based country policy processes
Poverty reduction strategies in low-income countries are the mechanism
for influencing development policies and plans and ensuring that actions to
address the Millennium Development Goals are implemented. Thus, a critical
entry-point for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment at the
country level is the poverty reduction strategy process.
Gender has been mainstreamed unevenly across donor-initiated Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers (Zuckerman and Garrett 2003). Whitehead’s
(2003) review in four countries found that gender issues appear in fragmented
fashion—addressed very little or not at all in policy sections of the
documents. Despite guidelines in the World Bank Poverty Reduction Strategy
Paper Sourcebook to treat gender as a cross-cutting issue, two of the four cases