A roadmap to advancing gender equality within the new aid modalities/Carte de route vers la promotion de l'egalite des genres au sein des nouvelles modalites de l'aide.

Over the years, several development co-operation actions by international development partners and national governments have been undertaken to reduce poverty levels and inequalities. Between the 70's and 80's, aid was largely allocated to recipient countries by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) with a focus on 'stand-alone' projects and structural adjustment operations. A shift in the 90's and 2000 saw the introduction of new aid modalities, with emphasis being laid on country ownership. Some notable aid modalities include: Basket funding; Direct/ general budget support; Sector wide approach (SWAps); Multilateral policy assessment based financing such as PRSPs and Country Strategy Papers (CSP) and Earmarked funds.

As the nature of development cooperation changes and new aid modalities get established, perhaps a critical question has been whether these changes and new developments include an architecture for promoting gender equality and women's empowerment? In a report recently released by the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID), the last decade has witnessed a notable decrease in the quality and quantity of funding for women's rights organizations around the world. For instance bilateral agencies like CIDA, the Dutch government, Sida and NORAD, which traditionally invested in women's organizations have since reduced their funds to NGOs. This decrease has partly been caused by a programme shift, which focus on gender mainstreaming strategies that prioritize on integrating cross-cutting gender analysis into mainstream policies and programs. While this has been somewhat successful, many development partners acknowledge that in practice, mainstreaming has often lead to policy evaporation: where a good policy goes nowhere without a strong program or funding. This in turn has resulted in diminished returns for women on the ground. (The Second Fundher report: Financial Sustainability for Women's Movements Worldwide).

Pragmatically, and in the words of Mary Robinson, President of Realizing Rights, the Ethical Globalization Initiative: "If you ask a woman in an African village what a human rights approach means to her, for example, she will say clean water and freedom from violence. Poor men and women are not concerned about what aid modalities we use. They have no understanding of what we mean by the term cross-cutting issues. Their concern is where they will get their next meal; how they will afford to pay for school fees or whether they can afford to pay health-care costs for their children. Any support that they receive needs to be planned to respond to the reality of their needs. Our ways of working have to be responsive to these. In many ways they are not, and the way we practice does not reflect an understanding of the determinants of poverty."

In actual fact, within the new aid architecture meaningful participation of women's rights organizations is key to ensuring the voices, concerns and proposals of women from different backgrounds are taken into account at all levels. Also, it is important that these new aid modalities integrate gender specific instruments such as gender budgeting, gender equality indicators and the monitoring processes of the implementation of internationally agreed instruments promoting gender equality and women's empowerment.

Since 2005, when the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PD) was adopted, there have been several initiatives by women's rights organizations and networks mobilizing and sharing strategies and experiences on how women can engage effectively both technically and politically within the Aid Effectiveness agenda processes at all levels. And from the onset, the year 2008 is shaping up to be a critical year for evaluating how effective aid is in helping to reduce global poverty and inequalities. Women's rights advocates are also increasingly mobilising for increased investments in gender equality in the new aid environment.

As a framework agreed upon by developed and developing countries to make aid for development more effective and aligned to national priorities, the Paris Declaration outlines five partnership commitments: (i) Ownership which commits partner countries to exercise leadership in implementing and coordinating nationally defined development strategies; (ii) Alignment committing donors to base support on partners' national development strategies, institutions and procedures; (iii) Harmonization committing donors to reduce fragmentation through harmonized and transparent actions; (iv) Managing for Results committing donors and partner countries to manage resources and improve decision-making for results; and (v) Mutual Accountability promoting donor and partner country accountability for development results.

Many have viewed the PD as a positive commitment to a "new paradigm" for aid between the principles of aid effectiveness and the practice and impact of aid on the ground. However, the PD has been criticized for being "gender blind" in its commitments and indicators of impact, owing to weak participatory mechanisms, limited collaboration among stakeholders and insufficient capacity and resources. And therefore, without effective engagement in the political process there is a danger that the implementation of the underlying goal, development effectiveness, will be Limited to administrative and financial procedures thus further contribute to 'policy evaporation' as concerns promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment. To ensure this goal is not lost, gender equality advocates have been engaging in a series of consultations in order to find ways to engage in both technical and political processes at all levels. Some of these consultations, where FEMNET has been involved in include consultations in Brussels, Johannesburg, Ottawa, London and Nairobi.