ECOSOC’s gender agenda
The UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) High Level Segment (HLS) kicked off last week with the Annual Ministerial Review (AMR), which focused on gender equality and the empowerment of women and gender is on the agenda in a humanitarian segment side meeting next week too.
The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) -sponsored side meeting, Challenges for Gender Equality Programming in Humanitarian Action, will look at operations in regular and high-risk humanitarian environments and aims to demonstrate that understanding and responding to gender differences is critical to ensuring quality and accountable humanitarian protection and assistance. It will also look at lessons learned on integrating gender into the response to the Haiti earthquake.
This made us curious about the kind of information we could get on humanitarian projects with a gender objective. First of all we looked at the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Creditor Reporting System (CRS). Some US$5.1 billion worth of DAC donor government and European Commission-funded humanitarian projects captured in the CRS were screened for gender objectives in 2008 – about 47% of the US$11 billion reported in total. Of these:
- 1.4% (US$70 million) had gender as a principal objective
- 22.2% (US$1.1 billion) had them as a secondary objective
- 76.4% (US$3.9 billion) had no significant gender objective.
Only 1.4% of DAC donor humanitarian projects that were screened had a principal gender objective (Source: OECD DAC)
The biggest share of the US$70 million that was specifically coded to projects with gender focus was Ethiopia, which received just under US$28 million for activities with a principal gender objective. The data shows us that USS$25 million of this was from the United Kingdom, spent through the humanitarian response fund. (Note: we are currently looking into this – is it possible for contributions to a humanitarian response fund to be earmarked in this way? Was the coding ‘retrospective’? We know that the fund was able to provide specialised treatment for malnourished pregnant or lactating women for instance. See the fund’s annual report (PDF).
View the Top 10 recipients of humanitarian funding projects with gender as a principal policy objective
Gender is a cross-cutting theme in humanitarian reform’s cluster approach, yet there is no quick way to ascertain the projects such as gender-based violence (GBV) that have a gender focus from UN OCHA’s Financial Tracking System (FTS). But there’s lots of interesting project-level detail to be found there – Go to www.reliefweb.int/ and click on ‘Make Custom Table’ function (http://ocha.unog.ch/fts/pageloader.aspx?page=search-customsearch)
Interesting further reading:
Back in April, the DAC Secretariat released an interesting paper on the gender equality policymarker which focuses on gender equality in sector allocable (or ‘development’) aid.
The Humanitarian Reform page provides a great overview and some interesting links .
