Commonwealth Secretariat
  1. Gender Home
  2. Vision & mandate
    1. Plan of Action for Gender Equality 2005-2015
    2. Secretary General's Reports
    3. 1995 Commonwealth Plan of Action on Gender and Development
    4. Update 2000-2005
  3. What we do
    1. Poverty Eradication
    2. Gender and Human Rights
    3. Gender Mainstreaming
    4. Gender, democracy, peace and conflict
    5. Gender and HIV/AIDS
    6. Knowledge-Based network (KBN)
  4. WAMMs
    1. 8WAMM
    2. 7WAMM
    3. 6WAMM
  5. Documents
    1. Reports
    2. Papers
    3. Newsletters
    4. Meeting documents, New York, 23-24 February, 2008
  6. News Archive
  7. Publications
    1. Gender Mainstreaming Series on Gender Issues
    2. Gender Management Systems Series
    3. Gender Mainstreaming Series on Development Issues
  8. Gender Links

Gender Management System

The Gender Management System (GMS) promotes political will, build capacities, forge partnerships and encourages the sharing of good practices.

GMS is central to the implementation of the Commonwealth's Plan of Action on Gender and Development, creates an enabling environment for gender mainstreaming, strengthens national women's machineries  and enables the gender mainstreaming of policies, plans and programmes.

The prerequisites for this are political will, human and financial resources, legislative and administrative framework, women and gender sensitive individuals in decision making positions and civil society involvement. This requires the applications of gender training, analysis, management information and performance appraisal tools.

The GMS is a flexible approach designed to be adapted to the national context. It may be used in a sector e.g. Health (Jamaica) and Agriculture (Sri Lanka) or institution e.g. Commonwealth Secretariat and University of Makere (Uganda); to address an issue (violence against women in Mauritius); or a cross-cutting programme (the national budget in South Africa) and human resource development programme (Seychelles).

A Gender mainstreaming approach is being applied in several Commonwealth countries in several areas including poverty alleviation, violence against women, trade and globalisation, gender responsive budgets, HIV/AIDS, land reform, peace-building and conflict-resolution.

Download for free the series of 'Gender Management System' Reference books and Gender Mainstreaming on Development Issues publications in pdf from the Publications section.

Commonwealth Regional Workshops on Gender Mainstreaming were held for the Caribbean region (Antigua and Barbuda, 2-4 May 2000) and the Asia region (Dhaka, Bangladesh 27-29 March 2001). Non-sale reports are available from the Commonwealth Secretariat and pdf copies can be downloaded for free.