Gender
02 Jul 2010
In Yemen, opportunities for women are unequal in terms of access to education, employment, healthcare and water. Recently, Yemen was placed at the bottom of a gender equality list featuring 130 countries.
NICHE aims to contribute to capacity development in gender through the Women National Committee (WNC). Among other things, this government body stimulates the creation and development of women’s departments in ministries.
The WNC will receive support to facilitate and guide gender mainstreaming in all NICHE projects from Project Outline formulation to Monitoring and Evaluation. The WNC is well placed for this task due to its acknowledged facilitating role concerning gender issues in various ministries and to its active role in updating and drafting gender policies and strategies.
In order to strengthen this role, it is necessary to support WNC in capacity building, training, ICT and the strengthening of management and networks.
Objectives
The first objective of the 2008 National Strategy for Women Development is ‘to provide basic education for everyone by 2015 and gender equal access to all education levels in all education levels and reduction of illiteracy among girls and women by half’.
Gender in the education sector
Both education ministries, MoHESR and MoTEVT, have women’s departments that focus on specific gender issues while MoTEVT has a vice-minister on women’s issues.
Gender in the health sector
The second objective is to ‘expand women’s access, at every age, to adequate and advanced healthcare services at an affordable cost and to employ more women in the health sector. The gender department of the Ministry of Health addresses gender mainstreaming and gender-based violence, but it is run by only one woman and has no budget.
Gender in the water sector
There are considerable gender discrepancies in the water sector. This sector is male-dominated like the water research area at the national level.
At the local level, however, women are directly facing the burden of water shortages which affect the supply of drinking water, water for household use and water to produce food crops. In the cities, the water shortages cause problems for cooking, cleaning and laundry. The Ministry of Water and Environment has a women’s department that focuses on mainstreaming gender activities.
