Financing for Gender Equality

Financing for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women: Leadership for a Sustainable Future

Empowering women is a good economic investment with far reaching benefits to the development of civilization.  This was the message delivered by a panel of experts at a parallel event for the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros, former chief economist with the World Economic Forum and a member of the Bahá'í delegation to the 52^nd Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, presented three key themes:  Productivity is linked to good use of human resources; the countries with the narrowest gap in gender gap have the most competitive economies; and encouraging the participation of women increases the skills set to which the public sector has access, thus fueling the “engine of sustainable growth.”

Wrong economic policies hinder women’s development, he said.  To harness the globalization process, governments need to do more to protect vulnerable groups and provide training to workers displaced by failing industries.  He said there is a need to better allocate resources to social needs, like education, public health, and infrastructure.

Dr. Lopez-Claros said that reprioritizing budget allocation to educate women and girls can be central to these kinds of social improvements.

“There is overwhelming scientific evidence linking female education and literacy to reductions in mortality rates for children, fertility rates, and levels of poverty,” he said.

The drain of corruption and misuse of funds needs to plugged, he said.  Openness and transparency in policy decisions is key to this, he said, citing Scandinavia as an example where the benefits of high taxes yield visible results in infrastructure and social supports. People can see what they are getting for their taxes, he said.

He said it is a poor excuse for governments to claim they can’t afford efforts to foster gender equality.

“My own experience suggests that the persistence of a distressingly large gender gap worldwide has little to do with lack of financial resources,” said Dr. Lopez-Claros.  Rather he cited religion, prejudices, taboos, and corruption of power as the likely culprits.

“This is not even primarily an issue of economic efficiency,” he said. “Gender inequality, Bahá'ís claim, is the primary reason for the violence and war at the base of our blood-stained history.

June Zeitlin, executive director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) spoke about a “new gender architecture.”  She said that investing in women not only advances women, but benefits the entire society, “a point that is often neglected,” she added.

There is no policy more likely to assist with all the other Millennium Development Goals, Ms. Zeitlin said.  “Here at the UN, we hear a lot about how important it is to advance the status of women, but we don’t know how to make that a reality,” she said.

She said it is not necessary for a country to be wealthy to address women’s inequalities.  The Social Watch Gender Equity Index shows that it is not income alone that determines gender equity, she said, citing the case of Rwanda which passed a quota for women’s representation on local governments.

“Rwanda had to reinvent itself as a country,” she said, referring to the devastating 1994 genocide there which decimated the population of this tiny nation with a per capita income of about US$200. “They needed to use all the human resources they had.”

Raising the income level for everyone is one way to begin to dismantle the discriminating barriers to women, she said. Every country, she said, can invest more in addressing the inequalities they face.

She said donor agencies can also be instrumental in promoting women’s equality.  Donor agencies, she said, talk a good line, but if you follow the money, you find there is a big discrepancy between their stated policies and where the money actually goes, she said.  She allowed for the fact that this might be a tracking problem and suggested there was a need for “watchdogging.”

She noted that WEDO is a member of the campaign for Gender Equality Architechture Reform (GEAR) which is seeking to insure that gender equality is part of the program of the development assistance in all national plans.

“There are lots of great words on the books,” Ms. Zeitlin said, “and many of us fought hard for those words.  But it’s not enough.”

The meeting was sponsored by the Permanent Missions of Canada and Paraguay to the United Nations, WEDO, and the Bahá'í International Community.  Nell Stewart, first secretary of the Permanent Mission of Canada facilitated the discussion and Julio Peralta of the Permanent Mission of Paraguay served as moderator. Mr. Peralta is also Vice-Chair of this year’s Commission on the Status of Women.