WE EXPERIENCE gender biases in our history and culture. To end this, our lawmakers drafted and passed laws promoting women empowerment, providing focal points, and pioneering gender mainstreaming.
Just before the year ends, I attended an orientation on Gender and Development (GAD) focused on gender mainstreaming. As far as I can remember, I wrote four articles this year about GAD, gender-sensitive issues, and new laws expanding the previous ones.
So, in this article, I will be discussing gender mainstreaming.
Under the Magna Carta of Women or Republic Act (RA) No. 9710, GAD is a development perspective and process that is participatory and empowering, equitable, sustainable, free from violence, respectful of human rights, supportive of self-determination and actualization of human potentials. It seeks to achieve gender equality as a fundamental value that should be reflected in development choices and contends that women are active agents of development, not just passive recipients of development.
Gender mainstreaming focuses on making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policies and programs in all political, economic, and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. It is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies, or programs in all areas and at all levels.
Among the efforts done for gender mainstreaming are better coordination among national agencies to produce sex-disaggregated data to monitor progress in the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); formation and capacity building of gender focal points in national agencies as well as local government units responsible for formulating their agency Gender and Development plans and advocating for their GAD budgets; and development of an assessment tool to gauge the gender-responsiveness of local government units and integration of gender indicators in the local and community-based monitoring systems.
I learned that the Women in Development and Nation-Building Act of 1992 mandated for gender budgeting. It provides that all government agencies should allocate at least five percent of their total budgets for gender and development concerns. This was added to the annual General Appropriations Act beginning 1995.
We have to sustain gender mainstreaming by using the right approach to encourage and uphold the promotion of the best practices in gender-responsive governance. As the year ends, let’s try our best to show respect and love to one another./PN
