ECA Embarks on a Project to Engender The Millennium Development Goals

Addis Ababa, 04 October 2007 (ECA) - The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), in partnership with UN-Habitat and UNDP's Regional Gender Programme- Africa Bureau, has initiated an important project on “Assessing progress in implementing the Millennium Development Goals in relation to Gender Equality in Africa”.

To kick-start this initiative, a workshop was held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 26-27 September 2007, gathering representatives from ECA's African Centre for Gender and Social Development (ACGS), the ECA African Centre for Statistics, UN-Habitat and UNDP's Regional Gender Programme- Africa Bureau.

Opening the workshop, Ms. Nefize Bazoglu, Head of UN-Habitat Monitoring Systems Branch, underlined the importance of cooperation and partnership between UN entities and hailed the initiative as a very encouraging example of such cooperation. The current project, she said, “ brings together two UN Programmes and the Secretariat. It also provides the opportunity for closer collaboaration between the Gender and the Monitoring Sections within UN-Habitat itself.”

In her introductory remarks, Ms Thokozile Ruzvidzo, OIC of ACGS, briefly recalled the genesis of the project, which was inspired by the initiative of UN-Habitat Global Urban Observatory to revisit the MDGs from a settlement perspective. The idea was then taken forward to review the MDGs with a gender lens and assess Africa's performance in this regard. Later, UNDP decided to support the project and commit funds for it through its Regional Gender Programme- Africa Bureau. Ms. Ruzvidzo also noted that ECA's repositioning exercise has widened the Centre's work programme to encompass Human and Social Development issues and thus make it more empowered to bring such project to fruition.

The major objective of the workshop was to examine the best way to operationalize the project and discuss a series of substantive issues related to the implementation strategy of the project and the respective roles and responsibilities of it various stakeholders. More particularly, participants examined technical issues intended to:

•  Develop a common framework of priority gender issues to be covered, so as to ensure a gender-responsive reporting on the MDGs;

•  Agree on a set of indicators and data sources that would be used to inform the evaluation process of progress achieved in implementing the MDGs, with relation to gender equality in Africa;

•  Validate the methodological guidelines for data computation drafted by UN-Habitat Global Monitoring Team; and agree on the format of the evaluation report.

During the meeting, participants examined all the MDGs from a gender perspective. They also discussed the possibility of developing additional indicators to cover the gender dimension, taking into consideration the relevance of these indicators to each goal, but also the availability of data. .

It was agreed that indicators such as compliance with international and regional instruments on gender equality (such as the Beijing Platform for Action, the International Conference on Population and Development, the Convention for the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women, The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People Rights on the rights of Women, etc) need to inform the evaluation process of the MDGs.

Participants noted with satisfaction the current international momentum on gender issues, and particularly the need to address evidence- based programming for gender equality through gender statistics. They noted that the latest wave of Demographic and Health Surveys systematically incorporated gender issues. In this regard, ECA representatives underlined that the Commission was actively preparing supplementary information for engendering the 2010 round of population and housing censuses.

Participants also examined potential sources of data and were introduced to UrbanInfo, a user-friendly computer software that UN- Habitat is currently using as a data management tool, combining both data, graphs and maps.

Closing the workshop, Mr. Oyebanji Oyeyinka, Director of the Monitoring and Research division of UN-Habitat, underlined that this important strategic partnership should be sustained and extended to other areas of confluence. “It is indeed critical for Africa”, he said, “to generate and disseminate knowledge and information on issues that are at the heart of its development process”.