The Gender Working Group

In 1993 Eurostep set up a special network on gender, within the larger network. This was the outcome of a meeting of gender activists from a number of Eurostep member agencies held in Rome in 1992. The Rome meeting had concluded that some kind of formal, resourced structure dealing with gender issues within Eurostep was necessary, to give credibility and weight to the work they were doing on gender. This was the birth of the Gender Working Group (GWG).

Since 1993 the GWG has consolidated and has become Eurostep’s most active working group, with annual meetings, a programme of ongoing advocacy work at various levels, and several publications.

The Gender Working Group has an ongoing agenda for gender advocacy. It works towards mainstreaming gender issues into Eurostep’s advocacy work, and aims to integrate gender issues into the relief and development programmes of the member agencies. The GWG also works as a pressure group inside Eurostep to promote changes which will ensure the development and implementation of better gender policies with regard both to the agencies’ programme work in the South and their own organizational development.

The GWG’s advocacy programme is guided by an overall strategy agreed by the Eurostep General Assembly, and includes work on the UN summits, key policy issues on the EU agenda and lobbying for full implementation of the EU’s gender policy.

A key aspect of the GWG’s work is dialogue with Southern counterpart organizations, and the GWG is working to deepen this dialogue specifically as regards the identification of common ground and joint North/South agendas for gender advocacy. In this respect the GWG has gained valuable experience not only through individual agency projects such as Oxfam’s Women’s Linking Project of 1993-4 but also through its close contact with Southern women’s organizations at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (1994), the World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen (1995), the NGO Forum of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), and their preparatory and follow-up processes.

• Women must have reproductive and sexual rights over their own bodies, health and reproduction, as well as access to properly funded comprehensive health care.

• Women’s civil and political rights are key to development - allowing them to participate, influence, and control decisions made for them and about them by communities, countries, and international organizations.

• Women’s economic, social, political, and human rights in development are universal and indivisible. They apply to all women in all areas of life, public or private.

• Women must have the right to freedom from all forms of violence and the fear of violence — at home, in the street, within social institutions, in armed conflicts.

• Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) affect women’s access to health, education and employment. They should be redesigned to take on board women’s basic needs and interests and to permit equal access to democratic development processes.

• Women’s rights can only become a reality if governments, IFIs and the UN put resources into implementing the Beijing Platform of Action and honour the commitments made at the UN Conferences on environment, human rights, population and development, and social development.

All Eurostep member agencies are members of the Gender Working Group, and the large majority participate actively. The Eurostep secretariat also participates, indeed playing a key role as the GWG’s closest geographical contact with the EU institutions.

The Gender Task Force is a smaller group of active members, plus the secretariat. It supports the lead agency in the planning and implementation of Eurostep’s advocacy programme on gender. Agencies work on different issues within the advocacy agenda, focusing on national and EU targets and capitalising on key events at national and EU level.

As with other Eurostep working groups, the work of the GWG is coordinated and led by a lead agency. Because the gender advocacy work is carried on with reference to both external and internal contexts, the GWG had two lead agencies from 1993 to 1995. Oxfam UK/I led on lobbying at the EU and the UN conferences, while NCOS was responsible for leading the work on genderizing Eurostep and its member organizations. This arrangement came to an end during 1995, when work around Beijing absorbed most of the GWG’s energies. The current lead agency (since the 1996 annual meeting) is Forum Syd of Sweden.

The tasks of the lead agency include:

• preparing agendas, taking minutes and distributing materials for GTF meetings;

• preparing the GWG’s action plan, together with the GTF;

• identifying people to write position papers in collaboration with the secretariat;

• writing half-yearly reports for Eurostep General Assemblies;

• promoting the visibility of the GWG both externally and within Eurostep at large.

Here is a brief summary of the themes and outcomes of GWG annual meetings 1993-1996:

• 1993 (Oxford, England): The theme was planning in development agencies from a gender perspective; but a wide range of topics was discussed, including mainstreaming gender and methodologies for monitoring and evaluation. There were several external speakers. This meeting put the GWG on the map. The report from the meeting was published by Oxfam as the ‘pink book’ and has become widely used in Europe and beyond.

• 1994 (Humlebaek, Denmark): Two separate but connected themes were discussed: gender and partnership, and partnership in advocacy and policy change. Concepts of partnership and gender were revisited, and Hope Chigudu, a guest speaker from a counterpart in Zimbabwe, gave a challenging view from the South, urging Northern donor agencies to give as much attention to genderizing their own organizations as they do to promoting gender equality in the South. The second day unpacked lobbying with a series of case studies, and strategies were explored for lobbying at the upcoming Cairo, Copenhagen and Beijing conferences.

• 1995 (Soesterberg, Netherlands): This year’s meeting, entitled ‘Creating scope for gender-sensitive organizational development’, brought the issues back home by looking at gender relations in Eurostep agencies. Three external facilitators guided participants through an exploration of gender in internal organizational development and the ‘two sides of the coin’: promoting gender equality in programmes with Southern partners, and promoting it in our own organizations. The results of the meeting have formed the basis for a book to be published in 1997 by the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam.

• 1996 (Oslo, Norway): This meeting offered an opportunity for review and evaluation of the GWG’s work to date and the upcoming programme. The meeting was organized as a relatively modest event without external speakers or facilitators and an emphasis on enabling newer or smaller member agencies to have a voice. A key issue that emerged over the days of discussion was that of democracy in Eurostep, with decisions to forge closer, structural links between the GWG and the General Assembly and to improve communication in Eurostep generally (see below, ‘Priorities and commitments 1996/7’). The meeting also commented on the gender sensitivity of the Partnership 2000 documents and discussed a gender analysis of the Reality of Aid report (see ‘Activities and achievements’ in this Handbook).I.

The Eurostep network is very diverse, containing organizations of widely differing size, structure, resources, insertion into national development policy structures, and gender balance. Much progress in gender work has been made by most Eurostep member agencies in recent years, but in many cases a significant distance has yet to be covered before gender work is seated right at the heart of all member agencies, in their internal development as well as their programme and advocacy work.

The GWG has held periodic reviews of the ‘state of play’ on gender in the various member agencies. In 1993 and 1996 questionnaires were sent out, the replies collated, and a verbal summary report given at the annual meeting. In accordance with current priorities and commitments, the GWG plans to carry out a more systematic mapping of gender work in its member agencies for a future edition of this Handbook.

In fact, lobbying for gender equality never stops. Because gender equality is not a separate issue but a ‘crosscutting’, or rather all-pervading, principle that should be inherent in every development cooperation effort, all advocacy for better development and greater social justice should also be advocacy for greater gender equality. Within Eurostep, the GWG strives to make this ideal a reality.

Much of the GWG’s work has involved influencing UN conferences and increasing public awareness of them. At the UN level, Eurostep lobbies for a gender perspective in recommendations from all UN conferences and for universal ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and other relevant international legislation. Thus, although the GWG has been most active around the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD, Cairo, 1994) and the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995), it has also seized every opportunity to raise gender issues at the conferences on environment and development (UNCED, Rio, 1992), human rights (Vienna, 1993), and the World Summit on Social Development (Copenhagen, 1995). This has involved not only lobbying the EU, for instance, to incorporate a gender analysis into its official positions at each UN conference, but also lobbying within Eurostep and the wider networks of European NGDOs to include a gender perspective in their own papers and statements, such as the Quality Benchmark papers. It has also involved pressing for follow-up of the recommendations and declarations from the UN conferences, and highlighting the connecting threads linking the conferences and the issues with which they dealt.

Prior to the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) at Cairo, the GWG met with a number of other European networks to establish priorities for lobbying during the conference itself. These priorities formed the basis of the EU-NGO Caucus during the ICPD, and included the following areas:

• reproductive rights;

• sexual and reproductive health;

• abortion rights;

• youth and adolescents;

• sustainable development;

• implementation and financing.

Eurostep produced an alternative ‘preamble and principles’ text as a position paper for the ICPD. Eurostep’s lobbying during the ICPD took place first and foremost through the EU-NGDO Caucus. The cooperation established with the Women’s Caucus whilst in Cairo was important in the processes leading up to the Social Summit and the Beijing conference.

The ICPD, and particularly the question of a paper on abortion, was an occasion where the GWG carried out internal lobbying with Eurostep directors themselves. The GWG argued that abortion was a development issue and that Eurostep, as a NGDO network, needed to take a position on it; but in the end, a common Eurostep position on abortion was not reachable, since some of the member agencies had strong objections to abortion on religious grounds. The final paper was a ‘sign-on’ paper, adopted individually by 18 member agencies but not presented as a product of the network per se.

Eurostep’s work on the Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) consisted of two strands:

• advocacy and agenda-setting work, mainly aimed at influencing the position of the EU institutions and official EU statements in relation to the conference, in and around the main preparatory meetings and at the UN conference itself;

• Participation in the parallel NGO Forum, including training and capacity-building activities.

The network’s involvement in the Beijing process began in September 1994, and was particularly centred on advocacy work to influence the position of the EU institutions and the EU’s official statements in relation to the conference. Building on the outcomes of Vienna, Eurostep’s advocacy agenda was based on a view of women’s rights as human rights and aimed at influencing policy in the areas of economic issues, conflict, violence against women, women’s human rights, the accountability of international financial institutions, and resourcing.

Four position papers were prepared, two workshops on economic reform were held in 1995, and there was extensive lobbying at preparatory meetings and at Beijing. Eurostep was one of the regional contact points for mobilizing around the Quality Benchmark position statement for Beijing. Networking was an important part of the process: in particular, Eurostep took part, together with WIDE and the EU-NGDO Liaison Committee, in a European caucus on development, which was active in the run-up to Beijing, prepared and held regular meetings with the EU Presidency during the official conference, and has continued to meet since Beijing to monitor progress on implementation of the conference’s commitments. Lobbying on debt by European NGO networks (e.g. EURODAD and WIDE), in which Eurostep participated, resulted in a sentence on multilateral debt cancellation inserted into the final Platform for Action emerging from the conference.

Most Eurostep member agencies were represented at the NGO Forum at Huairou, and member agencies, singly or jointly, hosted five workshops on behalf of Eurostep:

• an East-West European meeting, organized by MOVIMONDO, which aimed to forge links between women working in development in Western Europe and women involved in community work in Central and Eastern Europe;

• a ‘Social Watch’ workshop, developing an idea first put forward at the Social Summit for a mechanism to monitor governments and aid donors on their implementation of commitments made at the Social Summit and Beijing;

• a workshop on the quality of aid;

• ‘The Art of Organizing: a non-stop training programme’, an ongoing series of training sessions in issues including gender and diversity, sponsored by Novib, which ran throughout the NGO Forum, facilitated by an international group of trainers from the Netherlands, Africa and Ecuador.

• a workshop on ‘Grassroots women’s strategies for challenging international financial institutions’, with women from Eurostep agencies’ partner organizations.

Several of the initiatives explored in these workshops have been followed up, for instance the establishment of a Social Watch process and more structured links with women in Eastern and Central Europe.

For a full report of Eurostep’s activities at the Beijing conference and during the preparatory process, including the various papers prepared from PrepComs and the NGO Forum itself, see the GWG’s Report on United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and NGO Forum on Women.

Most member agencies of Eurostep have undertaken one or another kind of follow-up activity to ensure implementation of the commitments made at Beijing and the Global Platform for Action, either in their programme work with Southern counterparts or in their internal institutional development.

At the level of the Eurostep network and the GWG, follow-up to Beijing was seen as the main focus for the GWG’s advocacy for 1996. The GWG is monitoring Eurostep’s production of papers for their incorporation of Beijing language, and a gender analysis of the yearly Reality of Aid report has been undertaken in order to mainstream gender issues in this report (see below). The Eurostep paper on Gender and Humanitarian Assistance is an exercise in monitoring the EC’s follow-up on Beijing. There has also been ongoing dialogue with policy-makers and discussions on implementation of the European Council’s resolution on gender, which was adopted as a direct result of the Beijing conference. A joint meeting of Eurostep, WIDE and the EU-NGDO Liaison Committee, to which members of the Commission, the Permanent Representations, MEPs and other Brussels based NGDO networks are invited, takes place each year. The Gender and Development desks of the European Commission, which are themselves supporting more general Beijing follow-up initiatives within the Commission, have welcomed the contribution of NGDOs and their lobbies of member states to keep gender on the agenda.

The EU is a major development actor in setting international development agendas. In the context of its regular advocacy work, Eurostep agency members meet representatives of EU institutions to lobby for resourcing and implementation of the EU Women in Development (WID) policy and other initiatives for women. Position papers on appropriate issues are also prepared and presented (see ‘Some other Eurostep publications and papers’ in this Handbook) .

Integrating gender into the dialogue with EU institutions is the specific job of the GWG. Since December 1995 it has been aided in this by the existence of the European Council Resolution on gender issues in development cooperation, which justifies NGDO demands for coherence between the EU’s gender policy, as expressed in the resolution, and policies on development, agriculture, structural adjustment, etc.

The GWG was active in lobbying for the Council’s adoption of a Resolution on gender issues, which culminated a process covering 13 years and seven previous Council Conclusions. Patient and persistent lobbying by Eurostep and other networks bore fruit on 20 December 1995, when the Development Council passed the long-awaited Resolution. This Resolution constitutes the first truly comprehensive policy statement on gender and development to be issued by the European Council of Ministers. It calls for a gender analysis to be fully integrated into all levels and stages of the EU’s development cooperation, and commits the EU to encouraging and supporting changes in mechanisms, structures and attitudes so as to reduce gender inequalities, promote women’s political and economic empowerment, and ensure women’s equal access to and control over social development opportunities.

Since the adoption of the Resolution, the GWG has lobbied hard to make sure it is implemented, with the writing and use of a position paper on Gender and Emergencies and lobbying particularly of the Irish Presidency in the second half of 1996.

A specific strategy for doing this was developed in early 1997, with the following objectives:

• to ensure that the EU makes a commitment at both Union and member state levels to ensure the implementation of the Council’s Resolution;

• to ensure that ECHO (the European Community Humanitarian Office) integrates a gender analysis into its policies;

• to ensure that the gender and development desks in DG IB and DG VIII of the European Commission obtain more staff, so as to enable them to ensure implementation of the resolution and training of Commission personnel both in Brussels and in overseas offices;

• to ensure that already existing common criteria and indicators for reporting on implementation and guidelines for sectoral approaches (e.g. the Global Platform for Action, UNDP-DPA) are taken into consideration in implementation of the Council’s Resolution.

A letter campaign was initiated in May 1997, targeted at the European Commissioners, relevant people in the European Commission and Parliament, national Permanent Representatives in Brussels, and the ministers of development of the 15 EU member states. The letter questions the failure so far to follow up commitments undertaken in the Resolution, and also points up the lack of coherence between the Gender Resolution and recent EU trade and cooperation agreements signed with Latin America and Morocco. (Copies of a sample letter may be obtained from the Eurostep secretariat.)

A particularly successful experience of advocacy work with the EU institutions was the timely preparation of Eurostep’s paper on gender and humanitarian assistance, prepared as a lobbying tool for the EU Development Council’s May 1996 meeting on the EU’s approach to the spreading conflict in Africa. Fitting in both with the resurgence of interest in gender after Beijing, the escalation of conflicts in Africa, and the EU’s highly visible role in relief assistance through ECHO, the paper ignited immediate interest in European NGDO circles and the EU institutions, where the gender aspects of conflict and emergencies were still unexplored. Among the follow-up activities is a seminar to be held by ECHO itself. Among the follow-up activities was a seminar held in November 1996.

Working with other networks is a key strategy for multiplying effectiveness and enhancing mutual support. Eurostep works with numerous other European NGDO networks based in Brussels, such as Women in Development Europe (WIDE), the European Network on Debt and Development (EURODAD), the EC-NGDO Liaison Committee, EuroCIDSE and APRODEV, for instance in the production and presentation of joint position papers.

The fact that GWG members was working in mixed, donor organizations conditions the group’s relationships with other organizations. It has affected, for instance, the way Eurostep works with WIDE, which had been most successful at the secretariat level and in the area of EU-focused advocacy. In 1994 WIDE and Eurostep collaborated on the production of a small book analysing the EU’s structures and procedures for development cooperation from a gender perspective. This was published in early 1995 as Gender mapping the European Union.

The Beijing conference provided particularly rich opportunities for networking among NGDOs. Eurostep was active in the European Caucus on Development, together with WIDE and the EU-NGDO Liaison Committee (see above, section on Beijing). In the course of the preparatory work Eurostep built up strong working relationships with women’s international networks based in both the North and the South, such as the Women’s Global Alliance for Economic Alternatives. Since Beijing, Eurostep, as part of the Development Caucus, has arranged joint follow-up meetings with WIDE and the EU-NGDO Liaison Committee.

Making Eurostep more gender-sensitive as a network, and helping the individual member agencies to become more gender-sensitive with the support of the network, is an important task for the GWG. All member agencies, particularly those leading working groups, should implement the commitment made by the General Assembly to promoting gender equality throughout Eurostep’s programme. Two strategies can help achieve this aim.

First, the secretariat, and especially the Eurostep Director, has an important role to play in ensuring that all key position papers emanating from the network meet minimum standards in terms of the integration of a gender perspective. This can be done by means of a checklist, which the Director can use to ensure the gender sensitivity of all papers Eurostep produces, either alone or in collaboration with other NGDO networks. Second, members of the GWG ‘shadow’ the lead agencies of other working groups, and their own agencies, especially when they are leading on a particular issue.

Internal lobbying by the GWG on the gender perspective ensured that Eurostep’s current five-year workplan for the period 1996-2000 includes gender for the first time. The production of this Handbook is also an element in the process of genderizing Eurostep and its member agencies.