New edition of Gender Net

Addis Ababa, 18 April 2008 - This new edition of Gender Net complements the previous one that was published in late 2007 and tried to examine the challenges facing women across Africa in enjoying their economic rights. This present edition focuses mainly on the economic implications of denying women their rights to productive resources and the effects that the growing feminization of poverty has on the economic sector as a whole, and on the welfare of other household members such as children and the elderly.

Among the solutions called for to invert the existing trend, this edition insists on the need for countries to invest in time-use analysis as a means of appreciating how women apply their time across productive, reproductive and domestic activities. This edition also underlines the need to engender statistics so as to assess the extent of imbalances between women and men in all areas and better address these imbalances.

This issue also insists that monitoring performance in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) should be done through the gender lens. Finally, Gender Net includes an analysis of the role that the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) can and should play to ensure that gender concerns are duly taken into consideration, both in monitoring tools and in policies and programmes aimed at addressing gender inequality and its implications on development as a whole.