MOST International UNESCO Workshop on “Measuring Social Public Policies: Inclusiveness and Impact” 25-26 March 2013, UNESCO Headquarters

The dimension of Inclusiveness in the implementation of UNESCO Priority Equality

By Cvetan Cvetkovski, Senior Programme and Planning Officer, Division for Gender Equality, UNESCO

As the Assistant Director-General mentioned this morning, together with Africa, Gender Equality is one of the two global priorities of UNESCO. As a crosscutting and intersoctoral theme, through the process of gender mainstreaming it is incorporated in all UNESCO programmes, including the social inclusion policy work.

I would not like to take too much of your time talking about UNESCO’s strategy on gender mainstreaming. I would just say a few words that I hope will explain why our gender mainstreaming strategy is inclusive and why it needs specific tools for measuring inclusiveness from gender perspectives in all areas of UNESCO competence, namely education, sciences and culture.

Gender equality and women’s empowerment, as understood and applied by UNESCO, are both fundamental human right and development goal. In both those dimensions, what matters is the substantive equality of situations, outcomes and results. To achieve that, in all its programmes, UNESCO uses the “transformative” approach by stimulating capacities in member states for establishing conditions, processes and measures to correct the discriminatory environments and to ensure that women and men are able to take advantage of equal opportunities towards real or de facto equality. This approach attempts to address the root causes of the existing inequalities by looking at “how” and “why” women and men are treated differently, or even when treated similarly, how and why they arrive at different outcomes.

For this reasons, the evidence-based approach is of crucial importance. Accurate, relevant and reliable information on the conditions of women’s and men’s actual lives is the only possible basis for measuring the degree of reducing the existing inequalities. UNESCO’s approach seeks to transform gender relations and to redistribute power and resources, to change the attitudes, practices and procedures, to remove the barriers for participation, as well as to change harmful cultural stereotypes.

The other dimension of the concept of gender equality at UNESCO is the women empowerment. It is based on the conviction that the roles and identities as women and men in society are socially constructed, learned and specific in terms of time and context and therefore changeable. Women’s empowerment is both a process and outcome. It can be individual or collective. It is about women taking power and control over their lives and becoming agents of their own development. It involves raising awareness about women’s situation, building self-confidence and developing self-reliance through gaining capacity and skills, increased access to and control over resources, access to power structures and decision-making and meaningful participation in those structure at home, in the community

1 and in the society as a whole. The ultimate goal of women’s empowerment is therefore for women themselves to be the active agents of transformation of gender-based power relations.

Although only the individual can empower himself/herself to make choices, processes that nurture the empowerment of individuals or groups can be supported by others. Women’s empowerment does not imply women simply taking over control previously held by men, but rather the need to transform the nature of power relations. This is understood as “power within” – as gaining self-conciseness; as “power with” – as capacity to organize with others for the purposes of developing and voicing their specific needs and interests, and finally as “power to” – as capacity to effectively participate in decision-making process, make choices, take decisions and effect change.

As a development goal, UNESCO’s philosophy is that sustainable development, human rights and peace at the global, regional and local levels can only be realized if women and men enjoy expanded and equal opportunities, choices and capabilities to live in freedom and dignity. Equality between men and women exists when both sexes have access to are given equal access to quality education and knowledge, capacity-building opportunities throughout life and in all domains, and the possibility to develop their full potential and personal ambitions; have equal opportunities, rights and obligations in terms of work or income generation; and to share equally in the distribution of power at all decision-making levels.

UNESCO’s gender mainstreaming strategy is striving to ensure that women and men benefit equally from UNESCO programmes and policy support. It is intended to transform development so that gender equality becomes both a means and an end. It aims at achieving all international development goals, including, but not limited to those explicitly seeking to achieve gender equality.

For UNESCO Gender mainstreaming means: • Identifying gaps in gender equality through the use of gender analysis and sex- disaggregated data; • Raising awareness about gaps; • Building support for change through advocacy, alliances and partnerships; • Developing strategies and programmes to close existing gaps; • Putting adequate resources and the necessary expertise into place; • Monitoring implementation; and • Holding individuals and institutions accountable for results.

In measuring gender mainstreaming and gender equality UNESCO uses a variety of existing indicators frameworks and indices when appropriate and adapted to the specific contexts within UNESCO mandate. Let me mentioned just few of them: • UNESCO is involved in the monitoring of the implementation of the Convention on Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women. In this capacity UNESCO submits its periodic report to the CEDAW Committee on the implementation of the articles of the Convention under UNESCO competence. To do this, we make use of the existing indicators developed in the jurisprudence of the Committee and its general comments.

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• In application of the UN common understanding of the Human Rights-based Approach (HRBA) we are also using the conceptual and methodological framework for Human Rights Indicators for monitoring civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights, namely the framework for structural, process and outcome indicators developed by the Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as adapted to the specific context of UNESCO’s mandate. • Further in its dimension as development goal, we apply variety of existing frameworks of indicators and indices for measuring gender equality in different contexts, such as: ‹ The UNDP’s Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) as the way to add a gender-sensitive dimensions to the (HDI), as well as the newest index - The Index (GII) for measurement of gender disparities. ‹ We also use the ’s Global Gender Gap Index as a framework for capturing the magnitude and scope of gender-based disparities and tracking their progress. ‹ And, of course, the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) as extremely useful tool for measure of underlying discrimination against women through discriminatory social institutions. • Let me also mention some of UNESCO’s tools in this area: ‹ The Gender Parity Index (GPI) developed by UNESCO Institute for Statistics as a socioeconomic index designed to measure the relative access to education of males and females. We also use a wide range of sex-disaggregated data and gender indicators from the UNESCO World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education which enables readers to visualize the educational pathways of girls and boys in terms of access, participation and progression from pre-primary to tertiary education. ‹ Last year UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning produced the Outcome report from the Policy forum on gender equality in education. This report discusses the tools for monitoring progress in gender equality in education and the strategies for empowering girls and women in education. ‹ Finally, UNESCO Framework for Gender Sensitive Indicators for media, offers a framework of indicators for measuring gender equality within media organizations and gender portrayal in media content.

We are using elements of these indices adapted to UNESCO contexts for measuring in day-to-day work, as well as in our training activities when appropriate.

The Division for Gender Equality started working on developing of a UNESCO integrated framework for monitoring, recording and drawing lessons learned for gender equality mainstreaming and initiatives. We hope the framework will be finalized by the end of the year and we plan to pilot it in West Africa with the support of UNESCO Office in Dakar.

Recently, UNESCO Internal Oversight Service commissioned and partially conducted the regular evaluation of the implementation of the Priority Gender Equality at UNESCO. The report on this evaluation is on the agenda of the Executive Board at its Spring Session in two weeks’ time. We hope to benefit from the recommendations, especially in its parts dealing with monitoring and evaluation and other mechanisms to assess progress in mainstreaming gender equality Organization-wide and in the Member States. The most important objective will be to develop UNESCO specific coherent set of relevant, specific and measurable indicators for sector’s contributions to Priority Gender Equality and most importantly to measure the progress in promoting gender equality in the policies and practices of Member

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States. We expect very much of this evaluation report since in conducting this evaluation, as a member of the UN Evaluation Group, our IOS made ample use of its Guidelines for Integrating Human Rights and Gender Equality in Evaluations.

Of course, we are also looking forward to benefit from this workshop and to learn more how to use social inclusion indices for analytical and monitor purposes in the process of gender mainstreaming in all UNESCO programmes.

The core of the Gender Equality Division’s work is the policy advice. First of all, the Division provides policy advice to the senior management and the Programme Sectors for mainstreaming gender in all UNESCO policies, strategies and programmes, as well as to Member States and relevant actors based on evidence and works to strengthen the research-policy linkages. The Division is responsible for raising awareness of the cross- cutting nature of gender dimensions in social, economic, scientific, cultural and educational fields. In line with this, one of the Division’s main objectives is to foster political commitment to gender equality, as well as to monitor its implementation in all of UNESCO’s programmes.

Efforts to promote gender equality may succeed if such efforts demonstrate relevance and usefulness in addressing existing challenges. Compelling evidence already exists which demonstrates that efforts to reduce poverty, promote human rights, achieve sustainable peace and economic and social development will be unlikely to succeed without systematic and concerted support of women’s rights, women’s empowerment and gender equality. It is necessary to focus strategically on areas where this link can be demonstrated.

Mainstreaming gender into all programmes and activities of UNESCO entails that specific gender components are fully integrated into policy advice, advocacy, research, and normative and standard-setting actions at global level. It also includes capacity development, monitoring and assessment, and other technical assistance at country level in order to ensure that women and men benefit from equitable opportunities in terms of empowerment, income-generation and participation in the decision-making processes at all levels.

UNESCO steps up these efforts in three main ways: by reinforcing upstream policy advice and planning support at country level; by emphasizing questions of equity and inclusion; and by using international fora to convince donor and beneficiary governments to maintain or increase their investments in domains within UNESCO competence.

Within this framework the Division for Gender Equality articulates and supports gender-related research and explores the measures to enhance research collaboration within the UN System, and more importantly, to build more effective policy advocacy that can make an impact on the lives of women and girls around the globe. Special attention is paid to the issue of the need of systematic generation, processing and interpretation of gender-related statistics.

In order to be relevant the policy advice should be evidence based and therefore based on the link between research and policy-making. The experience shows that purely academic research is not always conducive to policy recommendation. Policy research and action research generally are more pertinent, since they involve the process of active participation in an organization’s or community’s change situation whilst conducting research and then translating those findings into policy-relevant, scalable solutions proposing a new course of action to help their community improve its work practices. Given the complexity of the policymaking process, research must evolve to meet new challenges in defining and measuring social problems.

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Finally, for the future work on the measurement of the impact of social inclusion policies it is crucial to define what category of research is about when we speak of the link between research and policy making and of informing policy-making by research. It should be methodological sound to produce relevant and credible evidence. Also it should be clear who will do the research and under what terms of reference, so that clear link is established between the conceptual frameworks, methodologies and results.

I thank you for your kind attention.

Cvetan Cvetkovski 25 March 2013 Senior Programme Officer ODG/GE

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