Two years after the adoption of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness that set out new aid modalities, questions on how to integrate gender equality and women’s empowerment in the promotion of development remain at the forefront of discussions and debates.

Foreign aid alone, as a means to help promote growth and development, clearly cannot lead to poverty reduction, human development, and gender and social equity. Despite this, gender inequality, women’s needs, and the non-recognition of women’s rights still seem to be missing in the current discourse on aid effectiveness.

“It cannot be automatically assumed that donors’ concern with good governance and financial accountability will have a benign impact on social goods and gender equality,” said Mariama Williams of the Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and the International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN) in her paper “Civil Society and the New Aid Modalities: Addressing the Challenges for Gender Equality, Democracy, and Participation.”

In March 2005, more than 100 developed and developing countries adopted the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness with the aim to improve the quality of aid and its impact on development. Gender equality has not been explicitly addressed in the Declaration. But civil society organisations are arguing that its implementation needs to be used to promote a wider development effectiveness approach, where gender equality is addressed and prioritised.

More concretely, in view of aid and development in Africa, Tina Wallace, a research associate at the University of Oxford’s International Gender Studies Centre, in her article “G8: The aid gap” pointed out that the Paris Declaration only resulted in donors’ commitments to fund development. For example, the UK gives as much as 50 percent of its funding to African governments through direct budget support. However, addressing issues of gender equality and funding for women’s concerns are not on the priority list of the government. Hence, women’s ministries remain weak and under-funded, unable to deliver any significant improvements for women and girls.

Furthermore, “A number of donors are pooling their funds through direct budget support to governments in Africa, to be spent against the major tool to address poverty, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Plans (PRSPs)...[but] rights, including women’s rights, are not integral to PRSPs...The PRSPs fail to address issues of women's subordination and inequality, which are sidelined by current agendas to tackle poverty,” said Wallace.

According to Williams, “[T]he new [aid] modalities are not inherently social or gender equality friendly. General budget support, sector-wide approaches are quite aggregative and will require creative forms of intervention in order to make them gender sensitive and empowering tools for gender equality and women’s empowerment.”

“Embedding gender and social considerations into the new aid modalities and making sure that these become critical cornerstones in thinking about aid effectiveness and aid absorption will require highly organised advocacy and lobbying on the part of gender advocates and civil society. This advocacy has to be both deeply sectoral (issue) and cross sectoral and grounded in wider struggle to promote and deepen the participation of the poor and marginalised,” Williams said.

For the full text of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, visit <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/11/41/34428351.pdf>.

Sources:
“Civil Society and the New Aid Modalities: Addressing the Challenges for Gender Equality, Democracy and Participation” from International Gender and Trade Network, posted on June 25, 2007, <http://www.igtn.org/page/728/1>.
“G8: the aid gap” from Open Democracy, posted on June 5, 2007, <http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-fifty/aid_gap_4675.jsp>.
“Paris Declaration Commitments and Implications for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment” from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, July 2006, <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/19/23/37320838.pdf>.