Gender and the Millennium Development Goals

by Caroline Sweetman

Overview

This collection of articles focuses on the Millennium Development Goals from a gender perspective. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of this way of understanding and addressing poverty, and suggests ways of strengthening the approach by using key insights and approaches associated with the thirty-year struggle to establish and uphold the rights of women. Contributions to this volume include articles on women’s rights, health, and education. Among the authors are Naila Kabeer, Noeleen Heyzer, Ceri Hayes, and Peggy Antrobuus.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780855985509
Publisher:	Oxfam Publishing
Publication date:	06/28/2005
Series:	Oxfam Focus on Gender Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.32(d)

About the Author

Caroline Sweetman is Editor of the international journal Gender and Development.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Making the links: women's rights and empowerment are key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals

Noeleen Heyzer

Men and women have the right to live their lives and raise their children in dignity, free from hunger and from fear of violence, oppression or injustice.

Millennium Declaration (UN 2000a, 2)

The Millennium Declaration, adopted by all UN Member States in 2000, outlines a vision of freedom from want and freedom from fear. Together with the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which make that vision concrete, the Millennium Declaration commits states to 'promote gender equality and the empowerment of women as effective ways to combat poverty, hunger, disease and to stimulate development that is truly sustainable' (UN 2000a, 5).

The recognition that women's equality and rights are central to achieving economic and social priorities is important. But it is not by chance that this has come about. It is the result of work by women's human rights advocates over decades, creating a groundswell of activism for gender equality at global, regional, and national levels. The commitments to women made in the UN World Conferences of the past two decades – in Beijing, Cairo, Vienna, and Copenhagen, as well as the Special Session on HIV/AIDS in New York in June 2001 – are fundamental to the vision embedded in the Millennium Declaration and the MDGs.

So, too, is the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), an international women's bill of rights – now ratified by 179 countries – which obligates governments to take actions to promote and protect the rights of women (UN 1979). It is crucially important that the specific and detailed commitments and obligations contained in these documents are not lost as governments and the international community begin to organise around goals and targets selected to track progress on the MDGs.

The power of the MDGs lies in the unprecedented global consensus and commitment that they represent. They establish a common index of progress, and a common focus for global partnership for development, which emphasise the needs of poor people. The MDGs also provide an opportunity to raise awareness about the connections among the eight Goals and the rights and capacities of women. The year 2005, which will mark the ten-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action and the five-year review of the Millennium Declaration, will present an opportunity to assess progress in implementing both the Platform for Action and the MDGs, especially Goal 3.

As governments and civil society come together to track progress towards achieving the MDGs, we have an opportunity to re-energise gender-equality initiatives, by insisting on the central importance of Goal 3 and the Millennium Declaration itself. As a recent World Bank report notes: 'Because the MDGs are mutually reinforcing, progress towards one goal affects progress towards others. Success in many of the goals will have positive impacts on gender equality, just as progress toward gender equality will help other goals' (World Bank Gender and Development Group 2003, 3). It is thus absolutely essential to ensure that tracking progress towards all of the eight Goals relies on sex-disaggregated data and gender-sensitive indicators. Many agencies and advocates for gender equality are producing reports that will contribute to understanding the gender dimensions of many of the goals and targets.

Progress, however, will again depend on the energy and commitment of women. How then, do women's equality advocates view the MDGs? In order to find out, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), in co-operation with the UN Interagency Network on Women and Gender Equality, the OECD/DAC Network on Gender Equality, and the Multilateral Development Bank Working Group on Gender, hosted a five-week online discussion on gender and the MDGs with more than 400 women's equality advocates, representing UN agencies, bilateral donors, multilateral development banks, and civil society organisations, as well as independent scholars and activists. What did this tell us?

First, women's advocates are dismayed that, despite their success in pushing for recognition of women's rights as human rights by governments through UN conferences, many of these hard-won victories are not reaffirmed in the Millennium Declaration, and are entirely absent in the MDGs themselves. They point to the lack of a goal on reproductive rights, or a decent work standard for women or men, the absence of issues such as violence against women, and the narrow targets and indicators for the gender equality goal.

As a result, many women's advocates have questioned the relevance of the MDGs to their work. Why should women's organisations pay attention to the MDGs when the need to tackle the roll-back in women's reproductive rights, the persistence of violence against women, and the rise in militarisms, extremisms, poverty, and inequality is so urgent? Especially when, at face value, the MDGs are operational and are devoid of any analysis of power relations. Nor do they take into account the inequities within the global economic system that exacerbate existing inequalities.

Several participants in the online discussion observed that, in much of the work on MDGs, the gender dimensions were often missing or treated as an afterthought. As one said: 'We have been witness to serious exclusions of a gender perspective in MDG Task Forces, MDG Reports and PRSPs [Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers]. This is just one symptom of a larger epidemic, that puts gender and human rights on a back burner.'

This has begun to change over the last year, as gender advocates made themselves heard in the Task Forces working on strategies for achieving the Goals, and in the statistical agencies working on better data and indicators for monitoring progress. States are already under formal, legal obligations to realise gender equality, particularly those states that have ratified CEDAW. For every area covered by the MDGs, there is direction on gender equality that exists in the core human rights treaties, and through the concluding observations and recommendations of the treaty bodies and special rapporteurs this direction has in many cases already been fine-tuned to the circumstances of individual countries. And, while CEDAW is not fully reflected in the formulation of the MDGs, the Millennium Declaration itself reaffirms a global commitment to implement the Convention.

Progress in implementing these agreements, however, has highlighted some of the obstacles to be overcome in achieving Goal 3. The five-year review of progress in implementing the Beijing Platform, held in June 2000, showed that the path had been bumpy at best. As the Secretary-General's report states: 'an improved understanding of gender equality does not necessarily automatically translate into gender equality in practice. Despite progress, the persistence of traditional and stereotypic gender roles, often reinforced by legal and /or institutional structures, impedes women's empowerment. Promotion of gender equality continues to be relegated to a lower level of national priority' (UN 2000b, 10). The result of this is that resources are often in short supply.

This uneven progress results from a complex set of conditions that lie at the heart of women's inequality. The structures that perpetuate gender inequality and discrimination pervade economic, social, political, cultural, legal, and civic institutions, norms, and practices around the world. The know-how and investments required to eliminate them are rarely committed, especially in poor countries. The political will required to achieve gender equality is variable, or altogether lacking. Although positive actions have been taken in almost every country, the Secretary-General's report concludes that 'more work needs to be done, at every level, to create the enabling environment envisioned in the Platform for Action, in which women's rights are recognized as an indispensable part of human rights and women as well as men have the opportunity to realize their full potential' (ibid. 10-11).

What will it take?

Making gender equality and women's human rights central to the MDGs means making connections between the MDGs and global agreements such as CEDAW and those that emerged from Vienna, Beijing, and Cairo. This requires a commitment from donors to finance women's empowerment. It requires support for women's organising, to push for policies to ensure that rhetoric is translated into concrete actions. And finally, it requires recognition by the international development community that the motor of gender mainstreaming is commitment to women's rights and gender empowerment.

For this reason, we must guard against falling into a kind of technocratic approach to gender mainstreaming that governments and agencies can adopt, without actually talking to women – particularly women who are poor and disadvantaged. We must guard against regarding gender equality and women's empowerment as a set of technical tools and concepts de-linked from practice, power, and politics. This is because, in the last analysis, all of these are necessary to build the vital partnerships needed to fulfil our commitments to the world's women. What women are telling us is that they need to believe in the rhetoric. In the words of one participant in our study: 'Women, and the poor in general, have suffered too much from economic recycling and broken promises. Women have reason to be very skeptical about cooptation, and attempts to use them as an excuse to push an agenda that is not theirs. We must make sure that agenda setting is not done without concern for our voices and warnings.'

The MDGs may represent another chance – perhaps the only one – to heed these voices and to link the goals and aspirations of women to the priorities of governments and development specialists. Achieving the Goals demands that we find a way to mobilise the political will and the financial resources to turn rhetoric into action.

CHAPTER 2

Gender equality and women's empowerment: a critical analysis of the third Millennium Development Goal

Naila Kabeer

This article discusses the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG), on gender equality and women's empowerment. It explores the concept of women's empowerment and highlights ways in which the indicators associated with this Goal – on education, employment, and political participation – can contribute to it.

Gender equality and women's empowerment is the third of eight MDGs. It is an intrinsic rather than an instrumental goal, explicitly valued as an end in itself rather than as an instrument for achieving other goals. Important as education is, the translation of this goal into the target of eliminating gender disparities at all levels of education within a given time period is disappointingly narrow. However, the indicators to monitor progress in achieving the goal are somewhat more wide-ranging:

• closing the gender gap in education at all levels;

• increasing women's share of wage employment in the non-agricultural sector;

• and increasing the proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments.

In this article, I interpret this as meaning that each of the three 'resources' implied by these indicators – education, employment, and political participation – is considered essential to the achievement of gender equality and women's empowerment. Each of these resources certainly has the potential to bring about positive changes in women's lives, but, in each case, it is the social relationships that govern access to the resource in question that will determine the extent to which this potential is realised. Thus, in each case, there is both positive and negative evidence about the impact of women's access to these resources on their lives. There are lessons to be learned from both. The article also considers some of the other 'resources' that have been overlooked by the MDGs, but could be considered equally important for the goal in question.

Conceptualising empowerment: agency, resources, and achievement

First, however, it is important to clarify what is implied by 'empowerment' in this article. One way of thinking about power is in terms of the ability to make choices. To be disempowered means to be denied choice, while empowerment refers to the processes by which those who have been denied the ability to make choices acquire such an ability. In other words, empowerment entails change. People who exercise a great deal of choice in their lives may be very powerful, but they are not empowered, in the sense in which I use the term, because they were never disempowered in the first place.

However, for there to be a real choice, certain conditions must be fulfilled:

• There must be alternatives – the ability to have chosen differently. Poverty and disempowerment generally go hand in hand, because an inability to meet one's basic needs – and the resulting dependence on powerful others to do so – rules out the capacity for meaningful choice. This absence of choice is likely to affect women and men differently, because gender-related inequalities often intensify the effects of poverty.

• Alternatives must not only exist, they must also be seen to exist. Power relations are most effective when they are not perceived as such. Gender often operates through the unquestioned acceptance of power. Thus women who, for example, internalise their lesser claim on household resources, or accept violence at the hands of their husbands, do so because to behave otherwise is considered outside the realm of possibility. These forms of behaviour could be said to reflect 'choice', but are really based on the denial of choice.

Not all choices are equally relevant to the definition of power. Some have greater significance than others in terms of their consequences for people's lives. Strategic life choices include where to live, whether and whom to marry, whether to have children, how many children to have, who has custody over children, freedom of movement and association, and so on. These help to frame other choices that may be important for the quality of one's day-to-day life, but do not constitute its defining parameters. Finally, the capacity to exercise strategic choices should not violate this capacity on the part of others.

The concept of empowerment can be explored through three closely interrelated dimensions: agency, resources, and achievements. Agency represents the processes by which choices are made and put into effect. It is hence central to the concept of empowerment. Resources are the medium through which agency is exercised; and achievements refer to the outcomes of agency. Below, each of these dimensions is considered in turn, as is their interrelationship in the context of empowerment.

Agency

Agency has both positive and negative connotations:

• Its positive sense – the 'power to' – refers to people's ability to make and act on their own life choices, even in the face of others' opposition.

• Its negative sense – the 'power over' – refers to the capacity of some actors to override the agency of others through, for example, the exercise of authority or the use of violence and other forms of coercion.

However, as noted earlier, power also operates in the absence of explicit forms of agency. Institutional bias can constrain people's ability to make strategic life choices. Cultural or ideological norms may deny either that inequalities of power exist or that such inequalities are unjust. Subordinate groups are likely to accept, and even collude with, their lot in society, if challenging this either does not appear possible or carries heavy personal and social costs.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Editorial
Making the Links: Women’s Rights and Empowerment are Key to Achieving the Millennium Development Goals: Noeleen Heyzer
The Education MDGs: Achieving gender equality through curriculum and pedagogy change: Sheila Aikman, Elaine Unterhalter and Chloe Challender
Not a sufficient condition:the limited relevance of the gender MDG to women’s progress: Robert Johnson
Major Distraction Gimmicks? A view of the MDGs from the Caribbean: Peggy Antrobus
Gender equality and women's empowerment: a critical analysis of the third Millennium Development Goal: Naila Kabeer
Out of the Margins: The MDGs Through a CEDAW Lens: Ceri Hayes
Where to for Women’s Movements and the MDGs? : Carol Barton
Linking women’s human rights and the MDGs: an agenda for 2005 from the UK Gender and Development Network (GADN): Genevieve Renard Painter for the GAD Network
Approaches to reducing Maternal Mortality: Oxfam and the MDGs: Arabella Fraser
Resources