The Department for International Development declared that it will contribute £10 million per year for the next two years to UN Women. This figure falls drastically short of the annual £20 million demanded by groups such as the Gender and Development Network and VSO-led advocates, The Godmothers. It is also just a quarter of the amount that the UK will donate over the same period to the UN agency for children’s rights, UNICEF. Given that UN Women is a brand new body, replacing its predecessor UNIFEM, a certain amount of caution is understandable. Yet Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, has already voiced his confidence in UN Women, its new strategic plan and its strong leadership in the figure of Michelle Bachelet, the former Chilean president. Surely, then, this would be the right time to keep the momentum going and to pledge the full amount so many have campaigned for.
Despite the shift towards gender mainstreaming in the policies and programmes of governments, international agencies and NGOs, one gets a sense within the international development field that women’s rights and gender equality are still seen as something of an ‘add-on’ – a nice bonus around the real core of economic development and alleviating poverty, hunger and disease. The UK Department for International Development’s 2010 Conservative reincarnation has led to an increasing obsession with box-ticking, measuring outcomes, and results driven concrete outputs. This is no doubt seen as all the more important as the overseas aid budget enjoyed the relative luxury of being ring-fenced last year. Perhaps this makes it a great deal easier to pour charitable support into ‘straightforward’ matters such as dealing with child mortality and education through agencies such as UNICEF. In the arena of women’s empowerment, where we find more obviously thorny and deep issues of radical power inequalities within and between societies, it is not always so simple to demonstrate tangible gains like supplying infant vaccinations or textbooks.
At a small organisation where I used to work, Leaders’ Quest, which runs leadership development programmes for grassroots community leaders, notably women, it was often difficult when writing reports to pinpoint concrete achievements in the kind of language that donors were used to hearing. Many programme participants were women living in the slum districts of Mumbai, including Aasha 1, who at the age of fourteen had been forced to marry a man more than twice her age who was physically and emotionally abusive towards her. When Aasha involved herself in community affairs, joining a protest rally against a new building development, her husband beat her horrifically. Nevertheless, Aasha slowly became more and more active in her community, and when her husband left her for another woman, she realised that she was finally free to recover her identity and determine her own life. Since then Aasha has remarried and joined CORO, a local community development NGO. Through The Leaders’ Quest programme she has received funding, training and mentoring to develop herself as a community leader. She trained herself in advocacy and activism, forming women’s groups, opening a complaint registration centre and providing support for victims of violence, as well as standing up for public health and safety, using strategies involving the police, legislation and the media. The difference between where she is now and where she was aged fourteen seems incredible. It is stories such as Aasha’s that really convey the essential nature of women’s rights and gender equality programmes, which all too often are seen as an afterthought or merely as a means of augmenting economic growth and welfarist outputs.
Rife domestic violence is an endemic problem on a global scale, and to help states address it is one of the major goals of UN Women. The infamous statistic that at least one in three women experience domestic abuse is evidence alone of its importance. Yet it is also one of those few issues that are horrifyingly comparable across virtually all societies in both the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ regions of the world. Given the seeming intractability of violence against women in countries such as the UK, the USA and Canada that are supposed to be the bastions of modern progress - the attitudes and behaviour which inspired the global movement of SlutWalks spring to mind - we need to seriously rethink what we mean by ‘development’ and what we are trying to achieve with our funding priorities. To achieve genuine and sustainable development, which should fundamentally mean justice, it is necessary to confront the power inequities that give rise to problems such as violence against women, even though gradual empowerment may be harder to capture in evaluation reports. The irony is, of course, as endless development experts, most famously Amartya Sen 2 point out, that investment in women’s empowerment and gender equality tends to lead quite demonstrably to all those other more concrete outcomes such as improvements in children’s health and education. It would therefore appear to be the best kind of value for money this efficiency-driven government could wish for. Pledging stronger support for UN Women as it gets off the ground would be a good place to start.
Posted on August 1, 2011
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