An Expert Group Meeting Convenes to Review ECA’s Gender-aware Macroeconomic Model
By Houda Mejri, ECA,  14 September 2004

The Director of ECA’s Center for Gender and Development (ACGD), Ms. Josephine Ouedraogo, chaired on Tuesday 14 September 2004 the opening session of the Expert Group Meeting in charge of reviewing the Gender-aware Macroeconomic Model recently developed by ECA.

Indeed, the Model- jointly developed with the University of Laval, Quebec, Canada- aims to help evaluate impacts of policies on poverty reduction in Africa.

It was tested in South Africa as a pilot country, and the report on the model as well as on the results of the policy simulation will be discussed during the Expert Group meeting scheduled to last from 4 to 15 September 2004 in Addis Ababa.

Ten high-level experts are attending this meeting, comprising renowned

Modelers and statisticians from various policy research institutes and universities, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development in selected African countries.

Among the participants, Prof. Bernard Decaluwe and Mr. Ismael Fofana (Laval University, Quebec, Canada; Prof. Duncan Ironmonger, University of Melbourne, Australia; Dr. Anushee Sinha, National Council of Applied Economic Research-New Delhi, India; etc.

In her opening remarks, Ms Ouedraogo noticed that over the past decade, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of macroeconomic policy in influencing women’s welfare and economic empowerment, whereas gender inequality can constrain the outcomes of macroeconomic policy. Yet, she underlined, there are few instruments which can relate macroeconomic policy and microeconomic behaviour. In this context, Computable Gender Equilibrium Model is one such a tool that can address these concerns.

The Director of ECA’s Centre for Gender and Development added that in Africa, mainstreaming gender in key macroeconomic policy areas has received little attention, and gender blindness continues to exist in the statistics of national accounts used to prepare national budgets. These have failed to recognise women’s contribution to the macro-economy, and to take into account women’s non-market work (domestic work) in the "care economy".

According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Ms. Ouedraogo stressed, women comprise 60% of the informal sector (including informal trade). They also provide about 70% of the total agricultural labour and produce about 90% of the food in Africa.

The overall objective of the meeting is thus to demonstrate how such a gender-aware ECA Computable Gender Equilibrium (CGE) model can be used to quantify the impact of macroeconomic policy upon men's and women's time allocation, poverty and welfare in Africa.

Among the benefits of a Gender-aware Macroeconomic Model, ACGD Director highlighted the following:

• It allows for accurate analysis of inequality in the distribution of women’s labour;

• It aims to demonstrate to policy makers with precision how gender inequalities in national accounts and fiscal policy might have differentiated impacts on women and men in terms of employment, income, leisure time, education, etc;

• It provides for assessment of the impacts of policies, which may challenge the new perspectives gained as a result of using the model to guide policy formulation.

The successful development of a model in ECA will provide Member States with a powerful tool for mainstreaming gender in the System of National Account and national budget. It can also be used to demonstrate to policy makers the rationale to adjust their macroeconomic policies.