UNIFEM Asia-Pacific and Arab States Regional Programme for Engendering Economic Governance demystifying economics and empowering women

Promoting women’s human rights by: Promoting dialogue between women and economic leaders on economic issues Building the capacity of women’s groups to influence economic policy Creating awareness of the differential impact of economic policies on women Analyzing the differential impact of government budget processes on women

Developing more effective policies to eradicate feminization of poverty by: Using gender-responsive methods to define, collect and analyze data Integrating women’s work in the household, family and informal sector into national statistical systems

Highlights Our work on Engendering Statistics for Nation Building in East Timor is now available. In this important venture we are working closely with the National Statistics Office, UNFPA, Statistics New Zealand and the Australian Bureau of Statistics to engender data collection for the first East Timor national census 2004, and also collaborating with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and others involved in the development of the System of National Accounts for East Timor. A Workshop on Engendering the Statistical System with Special Reference to the Population Census 2004 will be held 26-29 November 2003. All speeches and presentations are now available for download from the report on UNIFEM input to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper at the World Bank's Second Regional Meeting on Gender, held 18-19 Sep 2003 in Siem Riep. This meeting is another element in the emerging collaboration between UNIFEM and the World Bank in the Asia-Pacific Region. UNIFEM is working with many Indonesian partners on A Legal and Rights-Based Perspective on Women in the Indonesian Economy. Notable steps have been formation of a National Advisory Committee on Women’s Rights from an Economic Perspective on 9 September 2003, and establishment of Task Forces that will conduct the legal assessment of women in the economy. The Task Forces, formed from various government agencies and representatives of women’s groups supported by researchers and a facilitator, were established during a Workshop held in Jakarta, 6-7 October 2003. During November 2003 our Regional Economic Advisor will be contributing to a series of meetings across the world including a Gender Poverty Summit in New Delhi, Inter-agency and Expert Meeting on MDG Indicators in Geneva, updates with colleagues in UNIFEM New York, a meeting on Gender Equality and the Millennium Development Goals at the World Bank, Washington, and engendering the 2004 Census in East Timor. A rigorous, exciting but exhausting schedule. On-going activities In Indonesia, the Programme promotes recognition and realization of the economic dimensions of women’s human rights by facilitating dialogue between economic decision makers and women’s groups. At a regional level and currently in Cambodia and Timor Leste, it is strengthening capacity to engender statistics through gender-responsive processes and methods of data definition, collection and classification, and disseminate sex-disaggregated statistics more effectively to a wider group of users, particularly women’s groups. The Programme is also building the capacity of users and policy analysts to carry out gender-responsive analysis of all data, including gender-blind statistics, for policy advocacy and formulation, and for monitoring the MDGs. In Egypt and Morocco, the Programme supports gender budgeting initiatives to demonstrate the differential impact of national and local public sector budgets on women and build the capacity of government to implement gender-responsive performance-based budgeting. In the Philippines, it supports efforts to strengthen the existing 5 per cent GAD budget mechanism as a tool for gender analysis of the total budget and advocacy by women’s groups to increase budget allocations for women’s needs and priorities, within the context of the national budgeting system. The Programme is also drawing out the lessons learned in gender budgeting across the region, including in UNIFEM-supported activities in Sri Lanka, India and Nepal.

Updated: 8Nov2003. Requires Netscape/Internet Explorer v4 or later, or equivalent