Evidence on gender equity and inclusion towards women’s empowerment: A reflection on lessons and challenges

Gender issues in development not only relate to ensuring access to opportunities and resources to women but also call for a change in stereotype mindset and behaviour towards women and other genders. Gender equality lies at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which recognizes that achieving gender equality is a matter of human rights and is crucial to progress across all the goals and targets. While being a goal in its own right, gender cuts across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals and is reflected in 45 targets and 54 indicators for the SDGs. Evidence shows that gender inclusion is critical to achieving a wide range of objectives pertaining to sustainable development. Recurring obstacles in activity design and implementation include: lack of attention to gender issues in design, specifically lack of baseline data, lack of participation by women and poor, lack of gender and social analysis expertise, and a failure to address gender issues at the level of activity objectives. The key areas needed to accelerate progress for achieving SDGs, and also need to focus on gender inclusion and responsiveness are: (i) enhancing women’s agency, capabilities and participation in decision-making processes; (ii) eliminating gender-based violence and discrimination; (iii) transforming power relations at all levels of society. This requires political will and stronger multi-stakeholder collaboration, involving not only national and local governments, but also civil society, the private sector, academia and the media. It also requires appropriate methodology and tools to evaluate these changes. In this session an effort would be made to explore areas that help to answer - Are our policy documents gender responsive? Do policies and programmes address gender issues adequately? Do we have capacities to evaluate with EFGR (Equity focussed Gender Responsive) focus? Building partnerships on gender equality through dialogue emerges as a most urgent matter from a few recent findings. Are we ready for this?