Regional Advisory Services

Through its African Center for Gender and Development, ECA provides regional advisory services in two major areas: the economic empowerment of women and women's human and legal rights. These services are provided within the framework of the divisional programme objectives which are mainly:

· T o mainstream gender perspectives into policies and programmes of member states; and

· To promote the empowerment of women in the political, economic and social spheres.

As such, the technical advisory services are provided to member states and requesting Inter Governmental Organizations, as well as NGOs focusing on the following:

* Enhancing member state capacity for gender mainstreaming: this includes support for development, formulation and review of national gender policies and programmes, regional training in gender analysis with emphasis on enhancing the capacity of member states and partner organizations to implement and monitor the impact of the Beijing Platform fir Action.

In addition, Regional Advisers are entrusted with providing technical support to UNECA Sub-regional Development Centres, in order to enhance their capacity to respond to requests for gender mainstreaming from member states and IGO's.

* Supporting promotion of women's economic empowerment. This focuses on providing support to women entrepreneurs, building their capacity in networking at national and regional levels, in addition to improving their access to relevant information and helping them strengthen their networks.

* Guiding policy formulation in the area of women's human rights. This includes providing advisory and technical services to member states, NGOs and sub-regional institutions at their request to help them develop specific policies for the advancement of women's human and legal rights; raising awareness as to the need to place this issue high on the political and legislative agenda; conducting capacity building training programmes; and assisting in mainstreaming women's rights and using monitoring and evaluation tools for gender- mainstreaming.