Knowledge Management Strategy on Gender as a Cross-cutting Issue

• Initiative Summary
• Results

The 189 countries attending the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 endorsed gender mainstreaming as a strategy to achieve equality between women and men. By doing this, governments, the United Nations and other development actors committed themselves to looking into the realities of women and men and the potential impact of planned activities on their lives before any decisions were taken, actions planned or resources allocated.  More than 15 years later, international organizations, the UN among them, have commissioned studies to assess the implementation and outcomes of gender mainstreaming. There is a general recognition that while there have been important advances in terms of definition of institutional gender policies, implementation remains inconsistent. The impact of the implementation of a gender mainstreaming strategy on the advancement of gender equality and women’s rights remain largely unknown.

The MDG-F explicitly recognized that progress on gender equality is critical to the achievement of all MDGs.  As a reflection of this deep conviction, one of the eight windows was dedicated to the promotion of “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment”, with the rest being mandated to integrate a gender perspective in each of their JPs. The MDG-F created guidance to encourage the development of gender responsive JPs and supported programmes to mainstream gender concerns both at implementation and reporting level. As part of this effort towards effective gender mainstreaming and results achievement for gender equality, the Gender as a Cross Cutting Issue KM plan was launched in 2010 with the aim of contributing to develop key capacities among a wide array of partners around knowledge generation, capture and sharing of effective gender mainstreaming in development programmes.

The KM plan for Gender as a Cross-cutting Issue looked, among other things, at the measures that should be taken to address gaps and inadequacies in implementation, especially in terms of analytical work, planning, reporting systems, mechanisms for accountability, resources and support structures. As such, it focused on: analysis of JP planning and results for gender equality within all MDG-F-supported programmes and across all windows; management of the Teamworks space, including documentation, discussions, networks and monitoring other KM spaces for linkages; and identifying gender expertise in individual programmes and making this information available within and across windows to further knowledge exchange and networking.

Experiences exchange initiatives:  

• Teamworks: a CoP was established with membership across all eight windows of the Fund; virtual and in person support was provided to all windows including through missions to knowledge management workshops for the Private Sector, Conflict Prevention, Gender and Environment windows, and through the participation in virtual and live global knowledge management meetings in NY.  The CoP was further populated with different resources and tools for gender mainstreaming in joint programming in the different thematic areas, including inter alia, all supporting documents developed for the web dialogues and well as for the documentation of case studies.

• Web dialogues: UN Women led a series of three web dialogues in partnership with UNDP-BDP and UNDP-BCPR, in both English and Spanish. Discussions were organized around the following three key topics: 1) Ending Violence Against Women (EVAW), 2) Women’s economic empowerment, and 3) Women’s political participation and leadership. These web dialogues brought together relevant MDG-F programmes to share their experiences and knowledge on promising practices and lessons learned.

Capacity building:

• Technical support to the KM strategies to incorporate gender dimensions in thematic KM workshops and meetings through the provision of inputs on workshop agendas, guidelines for discussion, and matrices for knowledge needs assessments. Participation in these workshops facilitated widespread diffusion of the KM initiative and the Gender Equality CoP platform in Teamworks, strengthened articulation and cooperation between windows, and also helped to assess the needs of JPs in all of the Fund's windows for effective gender mainstreaming.

Knowledge Products:

• UN Women partnered with UNDP-BDP to jointly develop two key studies on the Fund’s gender equality results (see also results: Gender Equality thematic window): 1) ‘The MDG-F Dual Strategy for Gender Equality’,  2)  ‘Effective Practices in Promoting Gender Equality for MDG Achievement’, which looks at interventions with a high potential to contribute to the advancement of women’s rights and gender equality results.  To this end, UN Women coordinated a documentation initiative, providing funds for select JPs to identify, analyze and document innovative practices among MDG-F JPs. The lessons developed as part of this initiative were all featured in the publication.