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WIDE at the UN Monterrey Consensus Informal Review Session on Aid
By Anne Schoenstein WIDE took part in one of the six thematic review sessions that are preparing the Follow-up International Conference on Financing for Development to Review the Implementation of the Monterrey Consensusthat will take place from 29 November to 2 December 2008 in Doha, Qatar. The review sessions take place at the UN Headquarters in New York, and all relevant stakeholders are actively invited to contribute. WIDE took part in the fifth review session on 1415 April 2008, on Chapter IV of the Monterrey Consensus, ´Increasing international financial and technical cooperation for development´. The programme for the two days started with a panel discussion, followed by interactive debates that allowed civil society representatives to air their views. The connection between financing for development (Doha) and the aid effectiveness agenda (Accra) became apparent during this review session on aid. However, the discussion of gender issues was far too short. Also, it was interesting to hear one of the panellists talk about macro-economic conditionality whilst not using the word conditions, and instead talking about proposal assessment, etc. The old picture that growth as such would lead to poverty reduction was portrayed again here promoting macro-economic policies and ignoring the negative effects they can have, in particular on many women and other poor and marginalised groups. In order to achieve sustainable development and improve the lives of all women and men, it is imperative that policies and measures include a gender and social analysis from the very beginning and take seriously the different realities of women and men and the power structures they are in. It must finally become clear that growth does not automatically mean that all or most people find a way out of poverty and that gender equality is not established automatically with growth either. A civil society representative pointed out the need for a better distribution of official development assistance (ODA). As discussions on ODA are generally gender-blind, WIDE wants to highlight in this context the importance of specifically allocating aid for gender equality and the empowerment of women, as already suggested in the expert group meeting on Financing for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women in Oslo in November 2007. The implementation of the new aid modalities and their mechanisms also needs to become gender-sensitive. In relation to ODA and innovative financing, there was a strong call to see this money as additional and not as a source to fill the gaps to reach ODA commitments. The President of the General Assembly will issue an informal summary of the two-day session that will be made available on the Financing for Development (FfD) website: http://www.un.org/esa/ffd/doha/chapter4/index.htm. Statements made by civil society organisations, panellists and countries are already available. WIDE is part of the Women´s Working Group[1] on Financing for Development that developed a statement[2] for this review session on aid. Amongst various other points the group calls upon Member States, UN agencies and International Financial Institutions to: - -recognise that policy conditionality undermines national leadership, democratic ownership and the right to development;
- -fully integrate gender equality and women´s empowerment with concrete commitments in Doha not only as a systematic issue and challenge, but also as a key development goal that has to be integrated into the other chapters of the Monterrey Consensus (a twin-track approach);
- -reflect a results-based monitoring and evaluation component with a special focus on how gender equality and women´s empowerment targets are being met in the existing and new ODA management review and performance tools; and
- -financially support and implement the acquisition and improvement of sex-disaggregated data, on a predictable, regular and consistent basis, to support planning, negotiation, monitoring, and evaluation of development and aid policies.
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[1] http://www.un.org/esa/ffd/civilsociety/csresources.htm. The facilitating group includes WEDO, WIDE, AWID, MADRE, Bahai´s International, ENLACE (a member of the Feminist Task Force GCAP), DAWN and ITUC. [2]To download the statement, go to: http://www.wide-network.org/index.jsp?id=370
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