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Good Practice Mainstreaming Gender

Good Practice

The following examples illustrate how countries have made significant progress and achieved practical outcomes from gender mainstreaming:

India reported that, despite complex factors such as a large population, diversity of regions, culture, religion, caste and communalism, its committed and systematic approach to mainstreaming gender in a number of strategic areas such as education, health, rural and urban development and community development has resulted in substantial outcomes: The NWM participated fully in the Steering Groups for the Annual and Five-Year National Plans. A "Women's Component Plan" was adopted to ensure that no less than 30 per cent of funds/benefits flow to women from other development sectors. This resulted in women benefiting from at least 30-35 per cent of the social sector allocations of the 8th Year-Plan. An integrated approach was taken towards empowering women through effective use of resources, infrastructure and manpower in both women-specific and general programmes. Guidelines on sexual harassment were disseminated and enforced with each Ministry/Department operating a special "cell" to consider complaints from women employees.

New Zealand recognised gender mainstreaming as one of the key areas for action, and developed working models for gender analysis in the areas of health, accountability measures and statistical indicators to monitor outcomes for women. Its base tool was the publication, The Full Picture: Guidelines to Gender Analysis which supported by extensive training of policy advisers, aimed at improving the quality of policy advice and service delivery across government.

The United Kingdom's Agenda for Women of 1995 was a "practical and coherent Plan of Action" designed to bring progress to improve women's lives with the message: Better for Women, Better for All. Gender mainstreaming into policy development was institutionalised from the outset in order to create a new "culture within government of working across conventional departmental boundaries." The 'mainstreaming' programme feeds women's concerns into other cross-cutting government initiatives under the banner of Good Government for Women. The Agenda for Women also focused on 4 cross-cutting areas of particular concerns: violence against women; family-friendly employment; women's incomes over a lifetime and teenage girls. Two other important components were: a proactive communications programme including non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and a research programme which included a "Listening to Women" exercise for feedback and impact assessment on effectiveness.

In Mozambique, women were involved in mediation, national reconciliation and reconstruction efforts. The groups they participated in were the Mozambican Women's Peace Movement and Mozambican Association for Demobilisation and Reintegration.

In Sierra Leone, women's groups developed strong coalitions to help sustain peace and development and took such initiatives as the development of an Education Training Module for a "Culture of Peace".

Full details of the Implementation of the 1995 Commonwealth Plan of Action on Gender & Development can be found in the Secretary-General's 1999 Report.