Gender in the Dutch international cooperation strategy

International gender policy

In November 2011 the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MinBuZa) outlined its international gender policy. In this vision, the ministry supports female empowerment and pledges to systematically pursue gender equality objectives in its foreign policy, including that related to development cooperation. Focus is on the MENA region and the 15 priority countries in the government’s development cooperation strategy.
 

Female economic empowerment

One of the objectives of the policy is to contribute to the economic empowerment of women, in the knowledge that their participation in the local economy increases national welfare. ‘Smart economics’ according to the ministry. Women entrepreneurship and their participation in economic diplomatic interactions are specifically targeted.
  

Translating policy into action

It is, therefore, striking and disappointing that only one reference (DCED programme) is made to the intention to support women as economic actors, in the joint implementation strategy of the two ministries (MinBuZa and MinEL&I) involved in international economic development cooperation. This strategy outlines more than 20 subsidy programmes with substantial budgets, aimed at supporting international economic cooperation with developing countries. Focus is on private sector cooperation (PSC). 

The lack of focus on gender equality in the joint implementation strategy is probably due to the fact that the cooperation that is intended in these programmes is aimed at SMEs and larger enterprises and not at the one-man businesses that most women in developing countries run, in some cases financed by micro-credit. MinBuZa has other support programmes for this group of women and level of cooperation.

Still that’s not to say that there are no women active in SMEs, large enterprises, or relevant public institutions in the 60 developing countries eligible for the PSC programmes. For example, I’m thinking of women in leadership positions in all areas of the economy (public and private domains) where important decisions are made which impact fair gender participation and access to economic opportunities. A critical mass of women is needed at the decision and policy making level in the financial/banking/legal sectors to help create an environment that does not discriminate female entrepreneurship.

Gender equality, therefore, remains important in the PSC programmes, and the two ministries can certainly also pursue this objective in the programmes.
 

Capacity building

One way in which the PSC programmes can contribute to women empowerment is through capacity development, particularly at the tertiary level of education. For instance, through the creation of links and synergies between the PSC programmes and programmes that specifically focus on capacity building (NFP, NICHE, MENA Scholarship Programme). How can these three capacity building programmes adopt the additional task of facilitating women empowerment in the PSC programmes?
 

The need to explicitly prioritise gender equality

However, in order to achieve the objective of supporting female empowerment through these programmes, the two ministries would need to explicitly set and communicate gender mainstreaming requirements. This is currently not the case.

Sixty years of managing capacity building programmes for both the public and private sector has taught Nuffic that whenever a sponsor does not explicitly include gender equality objectives in its cooperation programmes, commitment to achieving the objectives is low, if at all present. After all, project managers and implementers are required to work efficiently. And what is not explicitly requested by a client does not necessarily have to be carried out.
 

Plenty of room for gender objectives

In my opinion, there’s still plenty of room within the already allocated budgets of the PSC programmes of MinBuZa and MinEL&I, to explicitly include women economic empowerment objectives and action plans. Particularly with regard to both human and infrastructural capacity building at a high level. Not doing so, would be a missed opportunity and create an unnecessary gap between the policy intention at national level and the follow-up actions at programme implementation level.
 

How to prioritise gender

When explicitly stipulating gender equality requirements, sponsors of cooperation programmes can choose the degree to which they wish gender to be mainstreamed in the individual programmes. They can choose to set specific targets when measurable gender equality results need to be achieved.

Such targets can be with regard to the number of women who have to participate in or benefit from the programme interventions or the amount of resources (specific budget) that needs to be reserved for women’s participation or empowerment in the programme (=gender budgeting).

Setting specific targets is the easiest way of pressing for results during programme implementation. In this case both the programme managers and project implementers are responsible and accountable for achieving the results. The focus is on outputs.
 

Flexibility

However, setting specific targets is not always the appropriate way of achieving qualitative results, nor is it appropriate where the local context can strongly hinder the achievement of specific gender-related targets. In that case, more relaxed requirements can be set in which programme managers are asked to ensure the mainstreaming of gender in all the phases of the programme intervention. The focus is on outcomes, and only where possible on outputs.

Such relaxed requirements are best managed at the programme level rather than at the project level. The responsibility for achieving the outcomes primarily rests on programme managers, who can juggle targets among a given pool of projects according to the enabling characteristics of the local contexts encountered.

It is then also up to the programme managers to articulate and communicate their expectations with regard to gender mainstreaming with the project implementers. These expectations will vary per project according to the context, but in the end the programme objectives (outcome level) will have been achieved.