PRESS BRIEFING BY UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT FUND FOR WOMEN

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT FUND FOR WOMEN

To ensure progress in the meeting the needs of women, "we must follow the money", Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) told journalists at a press briefing this morning at United Nations Headquarters. In today's world, it was not just governments that must be held accountable for progress in meeting global targets, she explained, but also the private sector. Governments must prioritize resources in such a way as to ensure women's concerns were on the agenda, but corporations, too, must be prevailed upon to exercise more social responsibility.

The briefing was held to launch UNIFEM's biennial Progress of the World's Women 2000 report. Ms. Heyzer was accompanied on the podium by the editor of the report, Diane Elson, and representatives of two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) -- The President of the Women's Environment and Development Organization president, Joycelin Dow, and the regional coordinator of Women in Law and Development in Africa, Joanna Foster.

[For a summary of the report's findings, see press release WOM/1208 dated 6 June 2000.]

The report pulled together commitments made at United Nations international conferences -– including the Fourth World Conference on Women held five years ago in Beijing -– and gauged progress and areas where there had been "slippage", Ms. Heyzer explained. It used the targets and indicators that had been set at the conferences, which were useful for tracking progress on issues like women's economic empowerment. However those targets were not as clear as they should be. They mostly focused on education and health, but none had been set to address the feminization of poverty.

Women were doing a great deal in reshaping globalization, she said. Globalization was an unfinished business, and women felt that only by being major stakeholders in globalization and, therefore, able to shape the agenda would all people benefit from it.

Ms. Elson explained that the report drew upon the expertise of women's groups around the world and the United Nations and its agencies. It was a tool for women to hold governments and corporations accountable, and to decide what further action was needed. The report found that there had been progress, but also some movement in the wrong direction. In 75 per cent of the world's countries levels of enrolment of girls in secondary education had improved since the mid eighties, but in the rest enrolments had fallen. Data gathered for the report showed that 88 countries had improved the ratio of women to men in government, and that the greatest improvements occurred in countries that had taken special measures to promote women's participation in parliament. However, there was declining representation in twenty-five countries, and only 8 had achieved the 30 per cent representation target set in Beijing.

For women's employment no specific targets or time frames were set at the Beijing Conference, she continued. The report showed that women's share of paid employment had expanded overall, but it ranged from 5 per cent to 54 per cent

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throughout the world. Most troubling in that area was the questionable quality of women's employment. There was no evidence of increases in the quality of women's employment, and too many of the new jobs provided no social protection. It was not at all clear how many of them even paid a living wage. Two areas of painful slippage were the falling away in women's representation in parliament in countries in transition in eastern Europe, and in sub-Saharan Africa a slippage in girls' enrollment in schools, she noted. These two areas required concentration.

The report also looked at ways in which women and governments were trying to transform the situation, she continued, focusing particularly on government budgets, on the social accountability of corporations, and on the ways women were trying to reshape globalization through challenging markets and using electronic commerce and communication to promote inclusion.

If there was one thing she sought from the current special session, it was a commitment from all governments to raise and spend money in ways that fully supported the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action, she said, using the tools of gender budget analysis. Those were being developed by women in partnership with United Nations agencies like UNIFEM and the Commonwealth Secretariat, and supported by the finance ministries in some countries. Following the money, and spending that money in ways that would contribute to implementing the Platform for Action, would make an enormous contribution over the next five years.

Ms. Dow said that one of the most important, and regrettable, things that was happening in the special session meeting was a fight over including indicators in the meeting document. The question of who would monitor any indicators and how they would be monitored had been raised. One valuable thing about the UNIFEM report was that it showed that such monitoring was being undertaken. Women were also being asked to justify their positions, she said, for example on structural adjustment. Women knew that structural adjustment programmes were very bad for poor women and had negative consequences, yet the aggregated data to prove that was not available.

The other critical element in the negotiations was the refusal by the developed world to link the issues of globalization and structural adjustment to their compound affects on women, most notable in areas like the quality of work, she said. It seemed women were now performing more paid work for bad wages, more work in the home, and having to deal with more violence in the home due to greater marginalization. The means to demonstrate a correlation between those problems and globalization, however, were not currently available. Clearly, quantitative statistics were not enough. Aggregated statistics were needed, and they must include qualitative assessments. It was very important for women to develop a body of data to make arguments in support of what they knew was happening on the ground.

Health and education levels had slid quite rapidly in Africa, Ms. Foster explained. That was a consequence of structural adjustment programmes that did not allow governments to spend on social welfare. Once government spending was cut in those developing countries with not much industrialization and small tax bases, a huge problem ensued. At the same time, globalization had clearly produced

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benefits for some parts of Africa, but the people who made money were men within the political structure.

Only South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia and Uganda had made real strides in integrating women into the political decision-making processes, she said. Others were trying to implement legislation. However, the 30 per cent target set in the Beijing Platform was not enough. African women needed equality. They needed 50 per cent representation. African women had realized that where there was no gender equity, there was no governance. Women had also lost ground since Beijing because jobs that had been introduced were not sustainable and secure, and provided no social benefits, she added. That was a result of globalization. Where an open market existed, there could be no protection for jobs.

At the same time, the gender budget initiative had worked very well in South Africa, she said. It was quite clear that when that tool was used, money could be put into institutional mechanisms to advance the situations of women. Countries that employed gender budget tools had come a long way, whereas those where the budgets were not women-friendly had not achieved much. It was very difficult to write a women-friendly budget in Washington that would work for a country that was not industrialized, where the economy was mostly informal, and where women were mostly employed in the informal economy, she said. Another problem was that governments did not have the ability to collect accurate up-to-date data. Much of the data available for sub-Saharan Africa dated from 1986 or 1994. Their capacity to collect data must be improved to allow accurate and gender-sensitive policies to follow.

There were at least twenty initiatives in place, in all regions of the world, looking at government expenditure from a gender equality point of view, Ms. Elson explained in response to a question. Some of those initiatives were within governments, notably in cooperation with the Commonwealth Secretariat. Those aimed to develop tools to analyze what the affect of the 95 per cent of government expenditure that was not expressly dedicated to women's issues had on women. In other countries, initiatives were being undertaken outside of government, in some cases supported by UNIFEM. Think tanks, NGOs and scholars were examining public expenditure, and thereby putting tools in the hands of parliamentarians so they could ask questions about how money was spent.

A wonderful project in the United Republic of Tanzania, for example, was featured in the report, she said. In South Africa, a non-governmental initiative was complementing an initiative in the Ministry of Finance. Analysis of how much Trade and Industry Ministry support for small businesses went to women was being undertaken. Similarly questions were being asked about who benefited from housing subsidies. People were gaining and sharing experience on the use of gender budget analysis, and the World Bank was interested in using this experience to influence its policies and programmes.

Asked to comment on the fact that only one of the eight countries that had achieved the targeted number of seats for women in parliaments was in the South (South Africa), Ms. Dow noted that the most effective tool for improving women's representation was the introduction of quotas. A quota system immediately transformed the number of women in parliament, and contributed to the generation

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of a critical mass. Another development was the establishment of political caucuses, with a common women's agenda, across party lines, she added. Women then negotiated on women's issues as a caucus. That worked very well in the Beijing + 5 meetings and also in many countries.

What was also needed was the use of the shame, she said. The material contained in reports like UNIFEM's could be used to raise questions about what governments were doing, but also what people were doing. The data in the report invited questions like, were women voting and were they voting in a positive way to advance women's issues. The report served to provide the tools for women to make interventions, and also to keep women committed to the commitments they had made with governments. Women must demand that the United Nations system empower and resource UNIFEM, she continued. UNIFEM had not even been able to monitor and address all of the twelve critical areas in the Beijing Platform in the report.

Ms. Foster said that it had been found in Africa that quota systems must be launched by legislation. Otherwise, they were not sustainable. In addition, a lot of countries needed to have equal representation written into their constitutions. In Namibia a one-off quota was established for local government, requiring 30 per cent of positions go to women. In the next election, where no quota applied, the percentage of women elected increased to 44 per cent. However, while it was clearly possible to get women into parliament, it had proven harder to get women into decision-making positions in the government, she said.

Ms. Elson added that some countries that were not rich were clearly doing a better job of encouraging equal representation in parliaments than some rich countries. It was political will, not wealth, that was required to address the Beijing target.

It was probably too soon to see much reaction to the UNIFEM findings, Ms. Foster explained, in response to another question. However, one of the responses she was hearing was that the data provided a tool for mutual monitoring. It encouraged peer review, and that was viewed positively by those attending the meeting. The recognition in the report of the agency of women, rather than their presentation as victims, was also drawing positive comment. Others found the report valuable because it looked at unpaid work, which often did not surface in economic analysis and, therefore, economic policy.

In response to a question about criticisms that had been raised at the special session of micro-credit, Ms. Heyzer said that micro-credit had put money in the hands of women. However, micro initiatives were not and could not be independent of national and international macroeconomic activities. One thing the report made clear was holding just one agent accountable –- for example, governments -- would not accelerate progress, she added. Partnerships between governments, civil society and the private sector were required, and all must be held socially accountable.

Micro-credit was a stepping stone, Ms. Dow added. It was not the answer. However, it had one important benefit, in that it ensured the recorded economy would note women's small-business activities. Women had been saving money and developing credit schemes forever, but that was invisible until the formal process

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called micro-credit was recognized. Reality was thus brought into the formal discourse. One of the problems about the scheme was that one-size did not fit all. However, the Grameen bank did not have to be the model for the entire world, just because it was successful in some cultures.

Ms. Foster added that the evaluation of micro-credit programmes was sometimes skewed against women's empowerment. Some women said they had given their money to their husbands, and that decision on their part was questioned. However, sometimes that exchange gave women power to negotiate within their relationships that they would otherwise not possess, and so it performed a useful –- although not immediately apparent -– empowerment function.

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