Opening speech at the 8th Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting

Mr President (Museveni), Madam Prime Minister (Diogo), Minister Bbumba and other Ministers, ladies and gentlemen ….

I thank you for your warm welcome, and in turn I extend a warm welcome to this, the 8^th Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting since the first in Nairobi 22 years ago.

The message then was the message now, and it’s the message of that excellent film which we have just seen.

It’s this: ‘Women count’.

Count them up, and you reach 3 billion – half the people on this planet.

Dis-count them, and you reach the state we’re in, where half of the people on this planet bear considerably more than half of its problems.

I believe there is no limit to the amount of times we should repeat the bare facts.

That two-thirds of those below the poverty line worldwide are women….

…. as are two-thirds of those who can’t read or write ….

…. as are two-thirds of the children around the world who don’t go to school.

Meanwhile half a million women die every year in pregnancy or childbirth.

And the face of HIV/AIDS is now that of a young African woman.

So women are still dying of discrimination – in our Commonwealth, and beyond. No one should let this happen, and least of all you.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the context in which we meet today.

If, just for a second, you imagine so many of the women we are talking about – perhaps HIV-positive…. perhaps widowed or with an unemployed husband …. perhaps a long way from water…. perhaps with children sick or out of school ….

…. then ask yourselves a question: what does a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper or an ‘aid modality’ mean to them?

What do they know about WTO negotiations, trade agreements, the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property RightS (TRIPS) when it comes to anti-retroviral AIDS drugs?

And what would they make of our meeting here in Kampala this week?

How do we ensure that so many women such as these benefit from the kind of development and democratic gains that we seek to promote?

Because the simple truth is that there cannot be either Development or Democracy without women.

Gender equality is a recognised marker for progress in societies.

So how much of that progress are we making?

What became of the fanfare of the Cairo Consensus of 1994 and the Beijing Platform for Action of a year later?

Almost the only way we can measure our progress on the status of women is to see where we stand on the two (out of the eight) Millennium Development Goals which relate specifically to women.

That’s the 3^rd Goal, promoting gender equality and empowering women; and the 5^th Goal, reducing maternal mortality.

All of the remaining six, of course, directly affect women, and none more than Goal 6 on HIV/AIDS.

But let’s be purist and look solely at Goals 3 and 5.

You will remember that within each Goal there are Targets, and within each Target there are Indicators.

All of which are quantifiable.

Under MDG 3, gender gaps in primary and secondary education were supposed to be eliminated by 2005.

The result?

No less than 90 countries worldwide missed the target.

South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are way off track.

Under MDG 5, it’s universally recognized that most maternal deaths are as preventable as they are unnecessary.

Yet still they continue: two-thirds of them happen in the Commonwealth.

Somehow, then, we are massively failing women.

Is this a policy issue? I believe so.

Is it a human rights issue? I believe so.

Is it a money issue? I believe so – and so do many people in this room.

It is the topic of our meeting: ‘Financing Gender Equality’.

I would like to say a few words about money.

On paper, things look healthy.

Aid commitments and debt relief have been scaled up since 2005; while the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness focuses on improving aid processes and quality.

So far, so good.

But has the aid been forthcoming?

Last week’s G8 Summit showed that it hasn’t.

The 0.7% ODA target is still a long way off.

And how far do the advances of ‘Paris’ address gender inequalities?

Do the concepts of joint assistance and poverty reduction strategies, direct budgetary support, and sector-wide approaches apply to gender equality?

When the world revisits the Paris Declaration of Aid effectiveness - in Accra, next September - what will it find?

It will find that there is increasing evidence that ‘women are being missed’ by development aid.

First, because the money is not in the pot.

I hesitate to quote economic forecasts incorporating ‘telephone’-size numbers and long-term projections, but I will.

A 2006 research paper commissioned by the World Bank estimates a shortfall of no less than $30 billion for the year, in funds needed to meet the 3^rd Millennium Development Goal for gender equality.

That figure rises to some $70 billion by 2015.

And second, because – as we well know – there are funding constraints, conditionalities over aid, and complicated new aid modalities.

Our Commonwealth task is not to allow women to be ‘missed’.

That’s why we now ask Commonwealth Finance Ministers to report every year on the way their budgets are constructed for the benefit of women, and of course girls.

And while overall progress is slow, change is happening, and especially in countries where Finance Ministries are leading.

I think particularly of places like Tanzania, India, Pakistan, and indeed this country, Uganda.

That’s why we have to lobby everyone who will be in Accra.

Our united voice must say that, for real development effectiveness, gender has to be at its heart.

And that is no pipe dream: it’s measurable reality, and one of the results of Accra must be an agreed set of indicators to show that this is being done.

I say this with confidence, because there is a science to financing gender equality, and I am proud to say that it was pioneered by the Commonwealth.

We were ground-breaking in the field of what we call Gender Responsive National Budgets, which in the confines of this meeting I think I am allowed to call GRNBs.

In fact it was you – Women’s Affairs Ministers – who launched the whole concept at 5 WAMM in Trinidad in 1996.

GNRBs have now been adopted by 30 Commonwealth countries, and 30 more beyond.

The first task of these budgets is simply to qualify and quantify the impacts of different elements of national expenditure, for both men and women.

The second stage is to reallocate resources where necessary, to benefit both men and women.

We have seen this happening in places like Tanzania, where a series of gender-discriminatory laws have been reviewed, and even more so India, where there are what we call ‘gender budget cells’ in no less than 50 Government Ministries.

So this is the irony.

All the tools are at the ready: our challenge is merely to mobilise them.

We understand the concept and scope of women’s equality – indeed our Commonwealth Plan of Action for Gender Equality 2005-2015 was and is one of the most far-sighted, flexible and comprehensive frameworks of its time.

I would suggest that it bears more scrutiny than the documents which came out of Cairo and Beijing.

And we understand the practice of women’s equality.

The Commonwealth and its member countries have already done the policy work to ensure that gender is recognised as a component of all government policy: from health, to education, to business, to political representation.

They have already produced the training manuals and capacity-building programmes to turn policy into practice.

They have done important work on behalf of women to influence trade policy and negotiations, while at the same time trying to link poor women workers to global markets.

And they have already developed the systems to monitor and evaluate their progress.

So all is set fair….. and it comes back to money, and to Nelson Mandela’s advice: ‘When the water starts boiling, it’s foolish to turn off the heat’.

I know that Commonwealth heads of Government will say the same when they meet – here again, in Kampala – in November.

Now, more than ever, we need to keep women’s rights and gender equality on the front burner.

There is compelling evidence that if we don’t, we risk doing a serious disservice to future generations.

It is your task as Ministers to see that women do not go ‘missing’ in development and democratic agendas.

Women need to have control over their life-decisions, their bodies, their minds.

Their lives need to be in their own hands.

We cannot simply agree that women’s rights and gender equality are integral to development and democracy, and then fail to make it happen.

That’s what we believe: so let’s put everything we can – and not least, enough money – into making it happen.

Thank you.

ENDS