PRESS CONFERENCE ON FINANCING FOR DEVELOPMENT AND GENDER EQUALITY

Even as Member States were contemplating better ways to finance the development of nations, proponents for the advancement of women’s issues said the international community was failing to devote enough resources to realizing gender equality, which they stressed was key to achieving international development goals.

Addressing that issue at a Headquarters press conference this morning -- moderated by Barbara Adams of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) -- were June Zeitlin of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, and Nerea Craviotto of the Women in Development Europe, who called for more funding for gender equality and women’s empowerment against the backdrop of a General Assembly dialogue on the implementation of the outcome of the International Conference on Financing for Development.

Ms. Zeitlin recalled that the Conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2002, had sought to foster partnerships between developed and developing countries in soliciting funds to build up poor nations.  The high-level dialogue currently taking place in the General Assembly, she said, would lay the groundwork for a follow-up meeting on financing for development in Doha, Qatar, scheduled for late next year.  As it happens, the dialogue was taking place at the midpoint between the creation of the Millennium Development Goals -- eight Goals set by the United Nations to improve living conditions around the world -- and the final deadline for achieving them.

“Progress has not been as great as it needs to be”, said Ms. Zeitlin, referring to the Millennium Development Goals.  “One reason for that is that there hasn’t been the kind of serious attention, priority and funding for the goal of gender equality, which is both a goal in and of itself, but also linked to the achievement of other goals.”

She said the so-called Monterrey Consensus, a set of agreements adopted by States at the 2002 Conference on Financing for Development, spoke of commitments to mobilize resources to achieve sustainable development and poverty eradication, but had not addressed gender equality to the extent called for by advocates.  A study commissioned by a group of bilateral donors to examine the flow of foreign aid had found that less than 1 per cent of official development assistance was being spent on gender programmes.

Ms. Craviotto, whose job was to coordinate the lobbying and advocacy work of Women in Development Europe, said that that was because traditional development models tended to focus on wealth generation, but not the equal distribution of wealth and its attendant social issues – such as women’s empowerment.

“There is now, more than ever, a need for policy coherence in terms of sustainable development, gender equality and poverty eradication,” she said, adding that most development debates failed to address the complexity of female roles in society.

Nevertheless, said Ms. Zeitlin, women’s groups and other non-governmental organizations devoted to social justice concerns continued to support the United Nations’ Monterrey process because it provided a forum for discussing world economic trends and domestic development issues at the same time.  But, even so, much more needed to be done by the United Nations to tackle development matters and women’s issues in a more coordinated fashion, and to channel funds towards women’s issues in a focused way.

She told correspondents that the Division for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and UNIFEM -- three women-specific agencies at the United Nations -- were grossly underfunded compared to agencies such as the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“The budget last year for UNIFEM was $57 million.  That is to implement the entire Beijing Platform for Action in countries around the world”, said Ms. Zeitlin.  That amount was roughly one tenth of the funds allocated to UNFPA, and was dwarfed by the budgets of UNICEF and UNDP, which fell in the range of $2 billion to $3 billion.

“Part of what we’re seeking is a much stronger, higher level, better resourced women’s entity here at the United Nations”, she said, adding that women’s groups had begun calling for a new women’s entity at the United Nations that would have the capacity to receive and spend “significant resources” on women’s issues in the field.  That entity would also be tasked with holding other United Nations agencies accountable for gender mainstreaming, since “evaluation after evaluation documents that they’re not doing the job, but there aren’t any consequences”.

Asked by a correspondent how the United Nations had responded to the idea, she said it had been discussed by the General Assembly during the sixty-first session, but no action had been taken.  But, she said she felt it was only a question of time before the goal was realized, since most Governments and those at the Secretariat were generally supportive of the idea.

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