 Well good morning everybody. I want to welcome you here to the US Institute of Peace. My name is Kathleen Kienist. I'm the director of the Gender Policy and Strategy Program here. For those of you who are new to USIP, it was founded in 1984. Congress as an independent national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, practical and essential for US and global security. We pursue this vision of a world without violent conflict by working on the ground with local partners. We provide people, organizations and governments with the tools, knowledge and training to manage conflict so it doesn't become violent and resolve it when it does. USIP is the eighth year of dedicated programming on gender and pealing and much of this work has focused on advancing women's participation in peace building activities including efforts to counter violent extremism in Nigeria, promoting community dialogues in South Sudan to name just a few. This month, in fact on March 1st, we began a month-long series of events in celebration of National Women's History Month. We had one week ago on when women in war aren't victims of the dirty blind spot and today is our second after-war gender equality needs investment too. So we hope that you will join us later in the month as well as we do a program on women in Ukraine, the revolution of dignity, March 30th stuck in the man box, young men and identity and the last one in the series, the effect of gender in mediating on violent conflict particularly focused on Colombia. So today we have a distinguished group of experts here for discussion around the importance of full and meaningful participation of gender in our peace processes and especially greater awareness about the areas that we're often quite blind to and that's the economic empowerment not just on the ground but in our institutional processes and I'm very pleased to say that we have gathered a remarkable group who is going to both educate us, I'm going to be educated here a lot and also inform us in terms of what it really looks like, this gender financing. So I'm going to begin with introducing the panelists and our moderator and then get us started. So on my direct left is Carol Cohn, she's the founding director of the consortium on gender, security and human rights. I think many of us are well aware of Carol's long-term research including one of her more recent books, Women and Wars and she is somebody who really is connecting the dots between security, peace building and this morning economics. So welcome Carol. On Carol's left is Tom Shear who is a program officer here in the economics and peace building at USIP. He has focused a lot of his research on the dynamics of war especially in relation to economics and resource scarcity. He recently finished his PhD in politics from Princeton University where he specialized in international relations and formal and quantitative methods. His dissertation Peace for Keeps examines how host governments use UN peacekeeping operations not to create peace but rather to stay in power. We'll be looking for a book soon, right? And on Tom's left is Janet Stotsky, economist and visiting scholar international monetary fund. She is currently an independent consultant on fiscal policies and gender but she was an economist with the IMF for 21 years where she held managerial positions in fiscal affairs and African departments and in the office of budget and planning. She is widely published on public finance, gender and macroeconomic issues. She has a PhD from Stanford in economics and a BA in economics from Princeton University. And our panel moderator today is no stranger to the issues of gender equality and women's empowerment. Carla Cappell is our vice president for the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation here at the Institute of Peace but previously she was the chief strategy officer at the US agency for international development as well as the very first senior coordinator for gender equality and women's empowerment. Carla has an MA in public policy from Harvard's University Kennedy School of Government and her bachelor's degree is from Cornell University. So it is my pleasure to turn the program over to Carla and to get this discussion moving. Thanks so much all of you for joining us today and the audience and those of you who are online I want you to know we are tweeting this morning at USIP gender and for those of you who are here there are Twitter handles on your bios. Thank you Kathleen and good morning everybody. It's a pleasure to be here during this month with all of you and particularly with this panel and on this topic one of the things that is particularly exciting to me is often we have discussions related to women, peace and security and then we have discussions related to the economics of gender equality but rarely is there a conversation really about the intersection of the two and its importance and so the opportunity really to dig into that conversation and to get a sense of really the state of play on how we draw connections, understand the connecting points and really think about how to carry forward the agenda is a really important one and one that receives insufficient attention. What we're going to do is start off particularly with presentations from Carol and then I'm going to use Tom a little bit as the foil or the discussant to kick off what I hope will be an animated conversation in an area which is a relatively new area of inquiry and then we will have a conversation with all of you because we're eager to get your wisdom and your observations but we thought it would be useful for us to frame that conversation so with that I'm going to turn first to Carol to frame those intersection points and really give us that context through which to look at this issue and carry forward the conversation so please. Thank you so much Carla, Kathleen, Danielle for getting me here and for all of you for attending I have to say it's wonderful and sadly unique to be in an institution that believes pieces possible practical and essential. So Dr. Janet Stotsky and I are going to be differently talking about some of the ideas that were discussed in a recent knowledge building workshop that was organized by the consortium and our Norwegian partners Nuref in Oslo in January and the first thing I want to say is that that workshop which was on gender public finance and peace building was part of a larger project the larger project which comes out of the consortium is known as the feminist roadmap for sustainable peace so I'll take a few and and the entire feminist roadmap project is in fact about economic issues in relation to peace building so I'm going to take a few minutes to talk about that project to contextualize this and then talk a little bit about gender public finance and peace building. One of the reasons that we started this project well actually one way to think about the reason that we started this project is to think about two different things one of them is the failures of peace building we all know the horrifying numbers of conflicts which you know within 10 years after a peace agreement have ended up it back where countries have ended up back at war and there's I think in general a lot of concern about whether our models of peace building are actually effective and the other issue is the women peace and security agenda it's 16 years plus since the resolution 1325 was passed despite herculean efforts by people every everything from women in conflict affected women in policy institutions to women who work in research and in education institutions not very much has changed or certainly not as much as we would hope and most crucially for what we're talking about today post-war reconstruction efforts have largely continued to deepen rather than ameliorate gendered structural inequalities so why is that and can we by bringing feminist gendered analysis do anything that could actually radically transform our models of peace building so that's um and you know if you think about why why not that much has changed in in relation to post-war reconstruction one way to think about it and I think this is something that came out in the secretary general's global study to mark the 15 year anniversary of 1325 one way to think about it is just to look at the funding and say you know despite the fact that the secretary general's seven point point of action said that 15 percent of funding to fragile states should be earmarked for gender equality the study found that no more than two percent has been so certainly continued rhetorical commitment continually backed up by not that much financial commitment but I think that there's another way to think I think that way is important but I think there's another way that it has to be thought about as well which is that we can't continue to think about gender equality as a separate series of programs and initiatives things that often get called women around women's issues as they're called um when when it is thought about as a separate series of programs and initiatives they are inevitably small they are almost inevitably uh not quite seen as important enough or we have to address the urgent stuff first and we can uh deal with these things later um and instead of thinking about gender equality in relation to a series of programs or initiatives we need to be understanding that all of the processes that are part of post-conflict reconstruction and peace building are themselves gendered they have deeply gendered effects they have the possibility of leaving gendered and other structural inequalities in place or of actually deepening them or transforming them so we need to be looking at all of those projects and the ways in which they are gendered in order to actually have an impact on gender equality what kinds of decisions am I talking about or processes am I talking about decisions about how infrastructure is rebuilt whether you're talking about roads bridges mobility energy water the decisions that get made about how to do this will affect the possibilities for women's livelihoods they will affect women's care burdens they will affect how they spend their time whether or not they are physically secure whether or not they even have the time to participate in political and economic life so infrastructure reconstruction which is usually seen as a technical urgent thing that happens prior to gender has to be thoroughly gender analyzed what other kinds of things decisions about natural resource exploitation extractive industries right mining timber gas land reform and decisions about land acquisition land accession agricultural policies trade relations monetary policy all of these are the kinds of post-conflict reconstruction processes that we have to be looking at now I would say the critical thing about each of the processes that I've mentioned is that they that they tend to be thought about either as technical issues or at least as issues that have their own logics that have nothing to do with gender right building a road that has nothing to do with gender we know how to build a road or we know what trade policy should be or we know how to you know lay water pipes but actually as I say each one of these and if we had a lot more time I could talk more about it have deeply gendered effects so think about this now in relationship to the women peace and security agenda one of the things that we assume with the women peace and security agenda is that if you get women into peace processes you will have provisions in those peace agreements that safeguard women's rights women's human rights that create structures for political participation that are more inclusive and it is possible if you have participation to get these things into peace agreements but then our concern and the concern that leads to this project is that those very processes that I was just describing as the sort of more thought of as the more technical post-conflict reconstruction processes can actually undermine any of those rights that you have managed any of those transformative provisions that you have managed to get your peace agreement and your post-conflict government so let me give you an example I've been talking pretty abstractly I know that you all know that during the long civil war in Guatemala Mayan when north of Guatemala were repeatedly the victims of sexual violence at the hands of the Guatemalan state military what some of you probably also know is that more than two decades later women in those same communities those same Mayan communities in northern Guatemala were victims of sexual violence again at the hands of state military civilian police and private military contractors who were acting at the behest of the Guatemalan nickel company which was in turn a subsidiary of a Canadian mining company okay so you know the sort of the the most obvious target of the women peace and security agenda sexual violence and armed conflict coming up again just later at the hands of militarized actors but not as part of the war as part of the economic activity right as part of mining nickel there is by the way a really great book about this by Luz Mendez and a colleague you can get it in Spanish from Amazon or you can download an English version for free from our website if you like so in addition to a horrible injustice for these women this is also an example of the ways in which if we are not thinking about things like mineral rights and who gets what kind of contracts with what kinds of provisions to exploit them we are not dealing with not only we're not dealing with women security but we're also losing we can be losing the transformative effects of the provisions that we have fought so hard for in peace agreements so the roadmap itself identifies what are all of these different processes that tend to occur in post-conflict settings it does gendered analysis of how do they usually occur who are the actors where is the decision taking place and then tries to come up with an alternative set of policies that everybody from people in policy institutions international actors who are participating in peace processes to local women's organizations who are advocating on the ground could be advocating for so it's if you're thinking about women at the peace table this is a very sort of forward-looking what are the kinds of issues the economic issues that you really need to be engaged in and knowledgeable about in order for the rights issues that you have been fighting for to actually have a material basis and to not be undermined okay so that is the roadmap now where does public finance come into it well public finance is one of the topics that we're trying to look at in this roadmap for sustainable peace and again i can talk about the other topics later if you're interested why are we so in public finance well as i know all of you here know there is a lot to fund at war right that if you are concerned about building peace you not only have the provisions of the peace agreement that need to be funded and here in fact you know many great peace agreements flounder right you get really good provisions in them but they don't get funded one of our colleagues who is at this meeting james boys talked about nel Salvador how the part of the agreement was to have a new national civilian police that was to take over for the corrupt militaries that police that existed before and also a land transfer program that was supposed to it wasn't land reform but it was essentially an arms for land program both of these would be key to building real security on the ground for women for men in the country neither one was funded and if they're funded what happens to your possibilities not only of having physical security but also transforming society in peaceful ways such that your peace can actually be sustained so the provisions of the peace agreement need to be funded you have all these things like disarmament immobilization security sector reform transitional justice all of these require funding the reconstruction of the country's institutions of its infrastructure and also the programs that could lead to transformations of the underlying inequalities that were part of driving the conflict in the first place but too often you have these sort of peace building ideas over here and you have macroeconomic policy over here and the kinds of macroeconomic decision making that's occurring on a completely different track from the peace building conversations and very often not only is it not supporting the peace building conversations per se but it also actually may be undermining it and again we could talk about examples of that so the question is how do these two together public finance and how do you do it in a way where you are bringing gender analysis in throughout every step of the way how every single decision that you're making here you're thinking about its impacts on men and women differently now what about public finance well when you fund post-conflict reconstruction not all of the funding comes from the state right we know that some of it is coming from private economic actors some of it's coming from those and so on but a lot of it goes through the state and it's important for it to go through the state because if part of building a sustainable piece is having people think that their state is legitimate part of why they think their state is legitimate is because it provides services it you know keeps its promises and provides services um so so public finance that means and we're talking about finance that goes through the state and public finance is usually thought of as having three different elements the collection of revenue you need the money to do it and you can be getting the revenue from internal sources such as taxation or external and or external sources such as loans and other kinds of aid whether it's coming from international development banks or bilateral donors um other mechanisms uh so so x so raising money externally and raising it internally and of course this is one of the things i think janet will talk about but how you do that in especially um in you could have a tax system that tends toward more gender equality or less gender equality you can have conditions that come with loans that actually support gender equality or that undermine it so the first one is collection of revenue the second one is allocation of resources through the budget process budget processes or processes that through which you decide what you're going to spend money on how it's going to be used how you allocate funds and the third is the manager of those expenditures so um i think the last thing i'll say here and janet will talk a lot more about these processes is that um of course at the end of a conflict there is usually a large influx of funds it doesn't last that long right maybe 10 years at the max so it's really a critical at which there are the resources available again to either transform things for the better or for the worse um and um we believe that it is an obligation of states under sida to actually be using these funds for greater gender equality most of the funds right now are used um gender equality funds are used for women's programs in health education and social services virtually none of them are allocated in the largest reconstruction budget lines which of course what's the largest one it's always security um and um but also recovery infrastructure development so that's our challenge is how do you actually think about each of those rather than projects for women in ways that will transform gender relations so janet it all right thank you thank you very much carol you were as you were talking i was thinking about one of the things i did was i attended the first and second second donor conferences in the signature of the comprehensive peace agreement between in what was sudan now sudan and south sudan and uh so i went to the first donor conference both were in oslo and they presented the uh the needs and the data analysis that had been done mostly by multilateral institutions on where there were gaps in access and health and education and all these different areas and then talking about where the allocation of post conflict the harvest of resources post conflict should go the cpa had been signed and then i went back i don't know five to ten ish male maybe it was three to five ish years later uh to the second donor conference and they went through the same exercise except that none of the indicators had moved because the resources weren't actually allocated to close the gaps in in terms of health or education or anything else and so you had this what felt to me like a pantomime exercise where you were talking about what but then the allocation of the resources wasn't actually targeting those needs in ways that you could start to see a trajectory that indicated there would be any real progress um and it was very frustrating to to watch that and and totally outside of how we think in the women peace and security agenda right yeah exactly yeah it doesn't doesn't touch carol and i go way back working on women peace and security and we basically didn't talk about these within that construct but more on that later um we're going to turn now to um janet janet dr janet scotsky who's going to give us a frame for looking at this with regard to janet gender budgeting um take it away i'm good to stand up there but i can't read my own powerpoint then i think it's in our interest to allow that and i can read here okay good morning well it's a pleasure to be here and i'd like to thank the u.s. institute of peace for inviting me it's a pleasure to speak on this very important topic and also to thank carol for including me and her project which brings together these really important issues as both of you have pointed out both carol and carla in in the introduction the overview and and the comments you're making now how important it is to bring together these issues of peace security gender and paying for it so my topic is gender budgeting and i approached this as a head of a project that was led through the imf the paid for by the united kingdom's department for international development and we were looking at this from the point of view of integrating gender into the public budgeting process so we weren't looking at this from the point of view of peace and security and the idea that carol had by bringing me into her project was to try to bring these ideas together and give them more substance so hopefully that this will stimulate your thinking and give more precise framing and methodology to the idea of the part of this agenda so i'd encourage you to think about that as i go through this presentation which really doesn't deal with the issue of peace and security but as you'll see it's the idea of how you achieve gender related objectives through the budget and some of those objectives importantly should be those related to peace and security but those weren't the focus of our project we were thinking more of the kind of traditional issues that the imf might deal with in its work with developing countries health care education and so forth which are related to the peace and security agenda as you might know because having these kind of public services is of course essential to having functioning governments that have legitimacy in which solidify peace on the ground and the idea of a government so you can see how there is an important connection between all these things but that wasn't our focus now my presentation today doesn't focus on issues of revenue but i'll be happy to address those issues in the question and answer period also the presentation doesn't focus on issues of what the imf is doing on its gender and macro agenda and how it's trying to integrate gender into its agenda so although i'm retired from the imf i'm working there as a visiting scholar but i'll be happy to answer any questions you might have it as to how the imf is trying to integrate this for itself a relatively new area of work into its both its research and operational work okay so let me take a few minutes to talk about the idea of gender budgeting how many of you have heard of this idea before a few of you okay so as you might know if you've been reading through this literature it has a lot of different definitions but i'd like to give you my idea of it and also to put it in the framework of economics so that you see how it can be dealt with as an issue of economics and public budgeting so gender budgeting it's the use of fiscal policy and administration to promote gender equality and girls and women's development so that's a very general definition and encompasses many things but it's one that you can see fits into the economist idea of something that should be used and integrated into fiscal policy so it's just saying that you bring into fiscal policy and administration the idea of of your gender related objectives and how you can achieve them through the budgeting process and i'd like to have been generally applied at the national level so there's maybe some 80 to 100 countries in the world that have tried something called gender budgeting but there are also many other countries that haven't done something called gender budgeting but have still tried to achieve gender equality objectives through the budget so it's a terminology it's jargon but yet it has substance and there are countries that don't use this terminology but yet still try to achieve the same substantive results so that's one important point i'd like you to start with but another important point is that it isn't only something that happens at the level of the national government it can be something that's done at the level of the state and at a local government so in many countries especially larger ones a country like the united states large one with very important state and local governments but also in the developing world many state governments let's say in india or anywhere in latin america even in africa today you have the devolution of responsibilities to lower levels of government state and local governments provide important public services so this should be seen as a responsibility for something even those levels of government should be taking on and in the examples i'll give later i'll point out how governments that are really trying to take this kind of initiative seriously apply this not only at the national level but at every level of government where important public services especially health education and infrastructure are being delivered now gender budgeting should be aligned with national development goals on gender equality and women's development it seems pretty obvious but not that connection is not always made but that should be the starting point you should align what you're doing in your budget to your national development goals now where governments then often fall short is after setting national development goals with respect to gender they fail to integrate them into the budget and that's why gender budgeting is so important and as carol was making the point and as carlo was then making the point if you don't give them any money nothing gets done and while that might seem very simple it's actually very complicated to make a reality and that's why gender budgeting is important is bring the importance of not just setting these goals in your national development plan but making sure that they're integrated into budgets and not just national budgets but budgets at every level of government where you have important public services being delivered and finally because i know there's always a lot of pushback maybe not in this audience today but in general the idea that gender budgeting is somehow a zero sum game that you're going to spend more money on women that means you're going to spend less on men gender budgeting is not all about just taking money from the budget to give to women's programs it's about spending money better to achieve national development goals that will benefit your whole society it's not a zero sum game and it's not just about reallocating money in the budget to benefit some at the expense of others gender budgeting should address any valid national development goals that will benefit your whole society and it can also address goals related to boys and men for instance recently looking at the gender budgeting program of the austrian government a developed country which has a very well developed gender budgeting program and their gender budgeting program identified some very important goals with respect to women domestic violence which is a growing problem in austria and it's related to men which involved uh road fatalities among young men and older men's health needs so gender budgeting for them both identifying the needs of women as well as the needs of men so it shouldn't be seen as something that's only women's specific although most of the people who have been proponents of it and have worked on it have worked on it in the developing country context where they saw the the under development of women's needs as essential and an important part to bring bring about but in the developed country context also many women's needs are still unmet but there also may be very valid needs in both developing industries for boys and men and they should be brought into this framework as well so i want to emphasize that it's about gender not just about women and it's not a zero sum game okay so let me turn to the uh next let me make this concrete for you what are some examples of gender budgeting goals so that you have an idea of what countries that are doing this kind of initiative are trying to achieve so in developing countries today it's a very really impressive achievement that primary education females access to primary education is almost equal to boys girls and boys in some parts of populations of the poorest countries that's not the case and still there's an issue of quality but that millennium development goal is almost achieved one of the few that actually came close to being met so that's still an aspirational goal but at the level of secondary education it's still not met in many of the countries of the world especially the poorest so one important goal of many gender budgeting programs in the poorest countries but also in other middle income countries is to equalize female access to education and what does this mean well this means building more schools it means ensuring that in secondary schools you have proper hygienic facilities for adolescent girls that you have running water this is an important issue as we'll see when i provide some examples from african countries that these are important infrastructure kind of spending that you have to to achieve equal access to education at that level in your school systems another area is health this is an important area where still you don't have equality to the basic health needs of of women and girls especially in developing countries and especially the poorest countries so that's another area where gender budgeting has been applied and some of these health needs like maternal health needs of course are unique to women but still you can bring that under the idea of gender equality and women's development if you broaden the idea to be not just equality but women's development for the course unique to women like bearing children another important area for gender budgeting would be things like reducing the unpaid time demands on women and girls to improve infrastructure so one of the little lead parts of of women's burden is there the demand of them on the unpaid time demands bearing water fetching water and bringing it to the households which can be an all-day time-consuming demand in many parts of the world which are water poor and where the infrastructure is poor or taking care of younger siblings things that cooking which it's all a very time-consuming thing where you have no electricity and you have a little access to fuel so you have to collect that fuel these are all things and I know for instance at USAID and others have been working with with countries on improving access to these things all of which reduce the unpaid time demands on women and girls and which give them the opportunity not only to go to school but to engage in market labor and paid labor so all of these things can be part of your gender budgeting program they should be part of the way you evaluate the value of public programs and public infrastructure you should make sure when you look at the benefit of spending you don't neglect the benefits you're reducing those unpaid time demands which is often ignored but an important component of the benefits of these public expenditures another area for gender budgeting is addressing women's lack of economic opportunity and ways in which public subsidies different either through the spending side or through the tax side can be used to generate more economic opportunity for women not just through improving their human capital through education and good health care but also through various kinds of programs either on the side of a man for their labor through subsidies or tax breaks to businesses or through direct subsidies and tax breaks to to women to stimulate the supply of their labor or ways to overcome biases all of these things can be built in through the budget as I said tax policies are another way you can approach it not just through the spending side but reforming your basic structure of your income tax so quite a few income taxes have been restructured with the goal of making them more friendly to what's called second earners reducing that higher effective tax rate on second earners which are generally considered to be women in many countries so many countries over time especially in europe for instance went from a joint tax system to a single filing tax system which was believed to be more neutral to to second earners so that's a big topic we can spend the rest of the day talking about it so i'm only going to mention that in passing but that's also can be a part of gender budgeting initiatives and finally there's an important point which is collecting the relevant data to have to build their capacity to collect gender disaggregated data but not only gender disaggregated data but data that's on the household which often can't be disaggregated by data because it's only collecting the household level but gives you insight into the kind of responsibilities that people in the household have and where you get some assessment for instance of the unpaid time demands so all of this is important for doing the right kind of analytics that support good public policy so i'm going to go through the rest of this presentation very quickly but you have the slides they were handed out at the beginning so that you can follow up and also at the end there's some references to the imf website where you can find all the working papers that came out of this and i'll just mention the papers so that whatever you're interested in you can look for it or you can always get in touch with me uh if you if you want to and i'll send you the papers but there were there were papers that came out of this project so one is an overview paper it's the basically laying out the fiscal framework and uh and i i authored that and the website will be at the end of this presentation it's laying out the public finance the economic framework for this whole idea of gender budgeting is trying to put it in the framework that an economist could understand and respect the idea of trying to give this a respectable respect in the sense of an economist viewpoint then the idea was to draw upon examples from each of the regions of the world or bring those in and show how gender budgeting was applied and some of the administrative aspects so that's in the overview paper so that's the shortest and most compact introduction then there were six regional papers that focused on different regions in the world and what we tried to do and these are the six regions we use basically the way uh that we divide things in the imf our work program asia europe middle eastern central asia pacific and caribbean islands sub-saharan africa and western hemisphere we picked the countries in each region that seem to have the most significant initiative so by significant we're not necessarily saying it was the best the greatest because we had a hard time assessing effectiveness but one which we thought was significant in the sense we thought it had actually accomplished something in the sense that many of these initiatives we didn't think had gone very far we felt that they had kind of run out of steam and the idea of this project was to try to extract the lessons from the countries that had accomplished something as a way of saying what it is that makes them successful as a way of making more of these move forward and succeed so these are the examples of the countries we thought had had done the most so in asia for instance australia india the philippines bangladesh and the republic of korea and so on and i would just focus on rwanda and uganda because that was the paper i wrote in the ones where i had two very interesting examples of countries that had really made this initiative work and in the case of rwanda a post-conflict country so one that made this initiative work under very trying and difficult circumstances then there were two other papers one which looked at trends just basic trends and gender equality and then a final one which looked at trying to measure the effectiveness of gender budgeting which there's really been very little eventual evaluation using data and that was using indian states so we may use the fact that not only in india do you have a national level initiative you have state governments which in india are quite large some the largest state in india is larger than most countries in the world so you had state governments state governments implementing this initiative at different points in times you had a very rich panel data set where you could use that to assess the differences between the states and how they'd implemented the initiative and we found the very interesting result which was that the states that had implemented this initiative well had done better in terms of achieving more equality in primary education than those that hadn't and that rising levels of income were not sufficient to bring about equality in education that there was something extra that was needed and that could be contributed by something like an initiative like gender budgeting so that we thought was a very interesting result sometimes people think that as long as the country develops gender equality will just come about as a byproduct what our finding was was that wasn't sufficient in which other people have found so that was an interesting confirmation of that result so those are all the papers you'll find them on the website and since I know I don't have too much time I'm just going to focus on sub-Saharan Africa and the example of Rwanda because I thought Rwanda was an example of a country that did a lot of the right things as I said under very difficult circumstances as you know it's a post-conflict country and was able to show that this isn't rocket science it's something that a serious government that really is intent on achieving a certain degree of gender equality can can make progress okay so what did Rwanda do well first of all it enacted an organic budget law so an organic budget law is basically saying a law that governs the way the budget is is done and it's not as serious in some sense as a constitution but it's more serious than let's say your annual appropriations law so it's somewhere in between in terms of the spectrum of laws and it incorporated gender budgeting formally into this law okay and it made gender budget statements mandatory and that was building upon the the example of Austria as I said which was an example from a developed country that also seemed to take this notion of gender budgeting very seriously so by doing this it was it was after a number of years of trying and not succeeding with its initiative in 2012-13 was basically saying we're going to put this into law which means that this is something the minister of finance has to take seriously because it is part of the the budget law so it's in the sense saying no matter who the minister of finances the minister of finance must obey the law and therefore this is now in the law it must be part of the work of the ministry of finance and that's the most important thing that we found in terms of success it might seem obvious to you that in the terms of the budget the minister of finance the ministry of finance must be involved but that wasn't always the case with many of the initiatives and that was one of the reasons we found that they didn't move very far if you put parts of the budget and women and children's ministries or things like that it's helpful in terms of understanding the issues but if you want something to happen in the budget if you want money to be appropriated you have to assign responsibility to where things happen and that's the ministry of finance so what we found in our survey of countries and what was the case in Rwanda is that the ministry of finance and the minister in particular whoever that person is has to take the lead and then has to assign responsibilities and I'm focusing on spending here but also you can apply this to the tax side has to have the responsibility to each of the spending ministries health education infrastructure the responsibility for identifying an objective a gender related objective that's important to their area of responsibility and then finding programs within their purview and making sure that money is allocated to them in the budget very critical and it's again as I said in an important component of the budgeting process and must be led from from this approach if you wanted to actually have results now what was very interesting also about Rwanda and which was was unusual was that Rwanda was at the same time undergoing a reform of its public financial management system so a number of countries in the world both in the developed and the developing world have tried to put in place something called program or results based budgeting some of you who work on budgeting issues might be with us it's the idea of moving away from line item budgeting where you look at budgeting from only what you spend on things to actually what you get from from public services outcomes so you you divide the budget into programs and outcomes that you expect to get from that budget rather than just focusing on the inputs or the amounts you spend okay so that's a very short way of of realizing that but Rwanda was trying to move from a very traditional form of budgeting based on light items and focusing on spending to one focused on outputs or outcomes and they integrated their gender budgeting into this public financial management reform and so that they they what was to me very interesting was that they assured that there should be an exact coherence between the way they were dividing the budget into programs and their gender budgeting initiative so that they would be able to see that they were exactly lining up their objectives with their programs that they they could then monitor and evaluate the outcomes so they started with four pilot ministries education health agricultural and infrastructure and again what was interesting here was that they didn't limit it only to the social sectors education and health but added in agriculture and infrastructure which were economic sectors they saw the importance of both having social and economic objectives for gender equality they extended it to the national government and then eventually to the sub national so again they saw the importance of having it at every level of government and then the final thing that they did which I thought was very important was they established something called a gender monitoring office so those of you who who work in government know that evaluating your outcomes and having an independent scrutiny of government program important in the end someone who evaluates the outcomes and is independent of the the entity itself so what they set up was an office to evaluate the outcome of gender budgeting and to write a report each year and now I thought was very innovative because almost no other country in the world did something like this in such a formal way and finally they engaged their civil and research community and there were various articles written which again was very helpful in writing my own analysis to be able to draw upon their own research and analysis of data so altogether a very nice way as I said very something that almost any country in the world would be capable of doing and show the seriousness and I just bring here an example of accountability and I won't take too much longer because I want to leave time for for thomas and questions but here's an example from their gender monitoring report so they have ministries and districts districts at the local level so they're evaluating themselves on the basis did they select sub programs that are service delivery in nature and have a big budget so they're giving themselves pretty high marks 85 and 73 percent then they're saying were they backed by comprehensive gender analysis with sex disaggregated data so at the ministry level federal level in other words no seven percent low evaluation at the district level they gave themselves a higher evaluation half of them were and then did the programs have clear linkages with outputs indicators targets and activities in both cases a pretty low evaluation so in other words they're actually being very critical of themselves and saying we tried but we haven't done very well so far so not only a trying which is unusual but they're actually being very critical of themselves which is even more impressive so I won't go through any of the other examples because I don't want to take up any more time but you have the you have the handout and you also can read the papers and at the end of my presentation which again I don't want to take up too much time I just want to say there were some lessons that we learned and now I will very quickly go through key ones so as I said many countries in the world have an implemented gender budgeting but we shouldn't limit our analysis to those countries because some countries try to adopt gender related objectives through the budget they just don't call their initiatives gender budgeting a few countries have been successful for instance as I cited Austria and Rwanda were two countries that I think deserve special recognition for the success of their efforts he is to success the leadership of the ministry of finance is critical ministries departments must identify important and achievable objectives consistent with their national development goals government must adopt policies that are consistent with these goals and then fund budget some national governments are important especially where they play an important role in providing public services international organizations you and women being the most in this area can provide important technical and financial support NGOs academic scholarship and advocacy all can play a catalytic catalytic role and nonetheless government involvement is ultimately the only thing that assures success you can't do this without the involvement of government sometimes countries have kept their initiatives alive through an active NGO community community but you can't achieve anything without the government being on board monitoring of outcomes and evaluation are essential and collection of appropriate data and use and supporting analysis is critical for low-income countries they should education and health care are still important objectives they shouldn't be ignored even though in some areas important progress has been made electricity water supply cooking technologies are these are still important areas of infrastructure for low-income countries and we're unpaid time demands of women and girls are still very important and this is an important part of the benefits that should be taken into account when assessing the the the infrastructure that government should put in place I think this is one of the key things that gender gender budgeting can bring to that process in addition to that you can look at other areas with the economy where women can be more productive and contribute more fully in the lowest income countries agriculture is still important and women still play an important role so that that's an area where one should look at it for instance in the case of Ethiopia they looked at the equal the equal access of women farmers to knowledge and training and inputs as an important part of their gender budgeting initiative there's also areas that are complementary to gender budgeting not only in tax which can be brought in as budget but financial civil and other laws women's right to property and other things also there's an important aspect I didn't talk about which is improving the administration of justice law in order to reduce violence this was an important part of the gender budgeting initiative of many of the countries just the funding of the administration of justice so not the direct service delivery but the funding to make sure that the administration of justice violence against women was was taken into account in properly fine and then there's a different set of issues that might apply to more developed countries if you were looking at those things related to let's say oh social insurance programs and so on for for older women but uh I won't talk about those at the moment the last set are some of the websites but as I said if you like anything you don't find it easily on the IMF web you can just get in touch with me and I'll be happy to send it to you great thank you so much very rich presentation of the analysis that IMF and others have done Tom you come from an interesting intersection point having been focused on economics of peace building and working on peacekeeping what are some thoughts you can bring based on the presentations we've heard this morning thank you everyone it's an honor to be on this panel and thank you Kathleen for putting this together and all the other events so this is fascinating I'll be brief because I know there's a lot of people in here with better experiences more more interesting experiences than I but for me this was a topic that initially as in last Friday I wasn't really sure how to how to really get a handle on it and now reach into the examples it's become very clear that these are things that we see all the time and that we just haven't had a good way to connect them or to frame them a kind of umbrella for them so while Kathleen's already hectored me about my book project I'm excited for this book project also to come out because I think it pulls together a bunch of things that that we don't really know how to talk about and then I'll also say in my brief involvement in government work right now I've realized quickly that budgets and contracts are everything and so that it only follows that gender a gender focused mindset has to start at that at that higher level there's there's two points I'll raise quickly one is just to echo I think there's a really big question here about conflict can raise can can what's the word can really bring some gender norms into bring them out so to speak that the conflict masculinity literature is is quite strong and there's a big question about when when people are working in conflict so I'm thinking about projects in Afghanistan how do you work within that structure and work with the existing hierarchies to to say win hearts and minds or support infrastructure projects how do you work within those infrastructure within those hierarchies without reinforcing them to a degree that that we might not want so to put that another way I think there's a really big question about about do you support the institutions as they are with all their faults or do you sometimes go around an institution so that you can pursue policy that might take into account dynamics in a in a more productive way and I think that's a question maybe that's very specific to certain context but that's a question I'd be very interested in in thinking about more and I don't have an answer to one other personal anecdote that I'll just say it's from where guys where this intersection has come up so part of my work here at the U.S. Institute of Peace we have a research project in Afghanistan supported by the Minerva Research Initiative and the question that they were curious for us was how do firms and businesses adapt to insecurity and conflict environments is a pretty interesting question for a couple levels one might think or one reason is we're trying to do a lot of job support or business support in these in these contexts so we should know a little bit more about how they're they're operating and the gender dynamics we hadn't thought a lot about on the front end besides what we all kind of know about Afghanistan but during some interviews over there with some business owners it was very interesting to ask the question what types of what types of violence affect your business and we heard some of the things you might expect that road banditry or the ability to move goods affected my business or government corruption was a major issue and I was fortunate to talk to one female business owner and she brought when you asked what type of violence most affected her it was the street harassment just going down to the market down the road and it clicked that this was crucial for our analysis of how businesses adapt insecurity because we won't see female lead or or businesses with more female employees we won't see them adapting to the types of insecurity that we're looking at in terms of insurgency because they're already adapted to an insecurity that is almost everywhere and all the time for them so without taking that that component into the analysis of how these different businesses are are adapting we would have totally missed that aspect so I think that's that's one place where the intersection between insecurity gender and international invention or attempts to support this work really came out to me thanks I think often those as you were talking often those stories are what really drives home what the practical implications are of the decisions that are made with regard to the flow of resources so I really appreciate that I was thinking and and I know some of you in the room have had an opportunity to hear um Ambassador Don Steinbergs is the former U.S. Ambassador Angola tells a story about um post-conflict peace agreement implementation in Angola where he discusses the fact that resources were allocated for demining that were focused on demining along roadways and the and they wanted to do that because they wanted to get economic activity back flowing across the country um but the unintended consequence was they didn't allocate resources to demining in fields and agricultural lands and as a result you had women disproportionately affected by mines exploded exploding and the ordinance blowing up because there hadn't been resources financial resources out to demine in the areas where women were going as opposed to the areas the truck routes and where men were particularly employed and it's a it's a horrible story about the lack of a gender perspective in a post-conflict but it really drives home why it's important to allocate resources in certain ways to bearing in mind the the different ways in which um men and women move within their societies post-conflict um and I was thinking as you were talking Tom about a similar example when I was at USAID we were talking about the spread of HIV and AIDS and this was true in conflict and non-conflict countries you looked at the differentiated way AIDS infections spread for men and for women and that the allocation of those resources had uh towards HIV AIDS prevention and treatment uh were very depending on if you were looking along truck routes isolates etc and whether they were spreading to uh sex workers along those routes whether they were in isolated communities where you didn't have primary secondary tertiary health care um with important implications for the economic well-being of those countries uh in the decade and decades following conflict so very these practical examples really drive home um how it's relevant and uh so I'm going to sort of take the opportunity as a moderator to ask one question and and I'm I'm very curious for everybody's perspectives on this um thank you Janet for talking about Rwanda it's a uh an important post-conflict example because there's been a real emphasis on attention to gender and women's empowerment within the Rwandan context I'm wondering and and all I know you've looked at at some of these issues as well you talked about where we should be putting the invested dollar in a place like Rwanda post-conflict and I'm wondering whether there's been any emerging literature about the emphasis from an economic perspective that Rwanda has placed on gender budgeting and what the implications of that have been for the peacebuilding trajectory uh or under equality in the country so Rwanda has the highest female political participation in the world um how has the focus on gender budgeting either helped assisted buttress the post-conflict process there or the um struggles for gender equality within the context of a poor post-conflict country and and I would welcome your thoughts and observations kind of carrying that case study forward yeah I can't really speak but it's a certainly a fascinating topic especially because you're now accumulating about 20 years of post-conflict stability so you're actually accumulating enough data to see that outcome certainly in the case of where their priorities were in their gender budgeting program it seemed to me they were certainly focused on education equalizing educational opportunities of girls uh especially at the secondary level and in the science area so it seemed to me they were trying to do what made sense in an economic sense even in whether was post-conflict or not what African countries need to do which was focused on the post the secondary level and then the post-secondary level the the scientific education the more influential jobs in their system from the the dimension of politics I I can't speak as much so in terms of the feedback to infrastructure I think that there seem to be but I can't really speak on that and some people have studied for instance uh India where there's had uh more women's participation and whether it's led to changes in public spending I think it would be fascinating actually to collect data on Rwanda and look at that influence and see whether it how it's how their jet in fact they've had an effective gender budgeting a relatively effective gender budgeting and this large women's role whether it's actually had an influence on spending priorities we actually asked the Rwandan whether they would be willing to share their data but we we haven't yet succeeded in getting the kind of unpublished data that we would need to do that but I think it would be a fascinating research topic and do you think and Carol I'm sure you have comments on this as well but do you think that their attention to gender budgeting has increased the stability within the country or has increased the development trajectory from an economic perspective in Rwanda I haven't done the kind of controlled analysis certainly they've had a very good development outcome economically I'm not speaking of politically but economically yeah they've been one of the best performers in Africa now for a sustained period of time uh us oh you know over this and they're a resource poor country they're very densely populated so the fact that they've been stable and growing rapidly says that they've done something right which their neighbors for instance in the area and elsewhere haven't been able to to achieve so but whether that's the gender or its other influences the fact that they just have a very you know stable situation compared to others politically good or bad it's been stable you know I so I haven't been able to do that but I think that would be a great topic to look at it now and that was one of the unrealized aspects of our project doing more evaluation of the outcome first was to identify the countries that had actually done well and then was to actually evaluate them with data because even though there's a pretty long record now of gender budgeting there's been very little actual evaluation of these initiatives with data the one we did with India is one of the only ones actually that actually use data from gender budgeting programs but it's an area where someone's interested in a research topic that would encourage them to to follow up because I think there's a lot to be learned from that and they're a good example that can be your next book Tom Carol so I want to answer you on a somewhat meta level I think that the one of the really interesting things that we need to think about here first of all is even what do we mean by gender right because we you know we there are some certain things that we always go to about access to education access to health and so on and access to employment and these things are obviously important but if we're thinking about the women peace and security agenda and thinking about gender equality does it mean we have to think about for example the impact of militarization on a society so not just you know do women have equal access to participating in militaries but does militarization in a society rely on and require certain kinds of ideas about masculinities and femininities having to do with you know protection and so on that are ultimately damaging for women or does militarization also lead to a set of um have implicit in it a set of ideologies about violence and force being effective means solve problems and how does that filter down to you know the woman who's going out onto the street and you know all or in the home or so so that um you know do we have to think about militarization when we think about gender equality or do we have to think about environmental degradation do we have to think about how an extractive industry um is you know polluting the land that women do their subsistence forming on or killing the fish in the lake that they're depending on for food and um you know so I think that the things that are easy to measure economically certainly and that are and that are typically related to a lot of kinds of development goals may not be the only so I think we I guess all I'm saying is I want to open it up and not just assume that we know what we mean when we say gender equality and what's going to actually promote it I think it's probably bigger and then and here you know bringing gender equality and peace and security together becomes really interesting because I don't know we can't know whether gender equality um leads to more peace right because we don't actually have the data right I mean this is not but I have to say that you know when I come to thinking about peace building in this way my interest is in making sure that peace building doesn't continue to well doesn't continue to happen in ways that it often fails but number two that it deepens inequalities rather than transforming them and and I mean gendered and other inequalities in doing that and so without making the causal argument equality will lead to I think it will lead to better peace building but I don't think we actually can have the data on that um and then I think if you go from some I mean I think part of what's really interesting about gender budgeting is that this is you know a tool by which you can say okay here's a series of objectives let's actually have programs that try to meet them if you say what about gendered peace budgeting what does peace add into gendered budgeting and how does that transform you know and what would peace budgeting be in the first place when you think about it as not just being about a certain model of stability a certain model of economic development but also something that actually dealt with some of these social inequalities so I think that we're you know gender budgeting is a great example of a tool that we then have to try to transform for gendered peace budgeting and figure out what that means your points are really interesting and important I think one of the things when when I was working on the gender equality agenda at USAID that came through was when we were doing work on women's labor force participation and trying to increase women's employment the way those programs were carried out often had important implications for sexual and gender based violence so if you didn't create space within the society for men and women side by side without resentment then you could have an unintended negative impact on domestic violence particularly and gender based violence in homes and communities and of course we know that often women have a broader definition for what is security and what is peace and so how they would feel in terms of how safe they are within their society if you have a rampant rise in domestic violence and gender based violence would be an interesting question and I think it gets to the issue you're raising Carol you know what does peace mean to different populations within a society so thank you for that I'm going to open up that I could keep talking and asking questions but I will not I have plenty if if we run out of others to open up the floor because we have about 20 minutes left for a conversation and what I would ask is two things first please make sure to turn on your microphone because we are webcasting this and so if you're not using your microphone they won't be able to hear your question and the second is please identify give us your name and your affiliation before you pose your question Matt good morning can you hear me good morning my name is Rosemary Seguero I'm a president of an unprofit organization that focus on conflicts and undercamban that focus on manufacturing innovation and here in the U.S. and back from in Africa I'm from Kenya looking at the post conflicts we're talking about investing in women as you just said to Rwanda Rwanda has 61 percent of women in parliament so with law even if they passed women will support because they are the majority but we have other countries like South Sudan like DRC that have passed Syria and other countries where women want to develop but because they have no voice and we have small small and these countries of conflicts have oil have minerals and this is what the law they were was so they want to give women small businesses like for microfinance sitting on that on that at home to do business and that's why I focus on manufacturing and the innovation focusing on women what can women do in mining in oil so that they can also become like men so how do we fight this because when you go to the government the government will tell you another story because when in Africa civil society are considered to be spy so we need a policy where civil society public sector can collaborate I was here in public club of partnership last week on Monday we're talking about partnership partnership how do these women how do we partner invest into women to do the actual business not microfinance business business that can lift the economy they can lift them and the economy of the countries how do we make this happen with the government being partners with the U.S. I U.S. Institute of Peace IMF I attend IMF World Bank meetings we are coming next week and I thank Madam Lakat putting gender into IMF so how do we make this collaboration to come and empower women in actual manner not just being down there but leave them to be you know pick up businesses great thank you very much maybe we'll take a couple questions and then we'll circle back to the panel so I think that's an excellent one I'm Jenny Bouvier from the U.S. Institute of Peace thank you so much for your presentations today and thank you Kathleen for putting this together I think it's a really important topic particularly for those of us who are working in peace process issues and looking at post-conflict reconstruction and trying to figure out how to make sure that women are left better off after the war than they were during the war I have a couple of quick questions one Janet you talked about the lessons that you pulled from gender budgeting from gender budgeting being applied in many different situations two questions first I'm wondering if you have any sense of you mentioned oh I don't do politics but I wonder if you would be able to chart out and do some sort of a study that linked the political participation of women in the countries that have gender budgeting to be able to see whether in fact where women are in power we're getting different kinds of budgeting procedures that are more inclusive of gender and the second part of it I'm wondering if you have any lessons from not the gender budgeting itself but the arrival of a mandate for gender budgeting that is how do you get to the point where you can have gender budgeting where you have the unequal society and unequal political parties or unequal representation in political forums that would discuss the gender budgeting secondly I just wanted to comment Carol I appreciate your comment that all processes are gendered I think this is increasingly important and it also gets it's one of the ways to get to the gender budgeting by getting around the divisiveness I think of saying we're going to have this group look at gender women's issues generally not gendered issues in this group look at the technical issues so I think it's an important it's an important launching post for going moving forward and finally Tom your comment budget budgets and contracts or everything I couldn't I couldn't say it more clearly but I think the other question is the question of power you know who has power who has power to decide how budgets are are allocated is is really important and where women are in those processes is even more important and where gender sensitive men are in those processes is really important the women as we found are not necessarily gender sensitive oftentimes the ones that get into power are are doing the same thing that everybody else has done to stay in power unless concerned about gender interests thanks we'll take one more and then we'll circle back hi my name is Anne sweet sir I'm an anthropologist working as an independent consultant I'm working on an idea here we've generally things have gone past looking at women's issues to looking at this broader situation of women but I don't hear much discussion about using these using gender budgeting or using this whole discourse to promote women's in a project you can easily have a poor woman fixing the faucets or monitor you know being the one who reports up if there's some some problem in the neighborhood or having young women working in it administering it or in andra you have women who go out other women are doing during the day and collect money from them and so on but would it not make sense to somehow include any implementation of a gender budget a gendered budget funding to promote the engagement of women in decision-making at the local level in monitoring or you know in appropriate ways that don't assert women that are going to be engaged in any way are already at the level of being able to participate in at the national government level or something in in order to spread around the possibility of enhancing women's empowerment not just in the economic sense but in terms of their own agency thank you great thank you three great questions um tom do you want to speak a little bit to kenya on the issues of resource extraction and and manufacturing and any ideas that have come from the search you've been working on recently uh i'll do one quick note on that since usip has has shifted some towards looking more at resource scarcity so that's something that that will be going into more in the future on the the gender side though i think this is a really important point about uh types of industries and and how they have their own underlying aspect to them and one quick story is the a voucher program for vocational training in punjab pakistan where they they may be adopted some lessons that instead of assigning people to certain programs to give them a voucher and a list of choices and the people looking at this program were still surprised to find that the men that received the voucher showed more pro-social behavior and were more likely to engage politically and the women were less likely and showed less pro-social behavior and the the issue was that the menu that was given to the women while they still had a choice the menu was very unsatisfactory that women saw the choices and saw this as the government devalues my work and why should i engage with that kind of government so i think that speaks to the importance of moving beyond maybe traditional female employment um roles and also speaks to the connection between the economics and the politics and the the need for uh good evaluation data all the way down on this process since some something that i've really appreciate about uh carol carol and janet's presentation sorry um either the issue of women's agency in the budgeting process or the connection between the gender budgeting political participation yeah and i know so i'll just comment briefly on the the first one because although i didn't touch on the revenue side you know resting control of natural resource and natural resource producing countries from vested interests is a whole separate topic but but there is an important issue is how much revenue the state gets from those and that that is an important issue our colleague jim who was in here but was part of carol's workshop talked about that and the whole issue that that this should be seen as a source of revenue just for the state and uh for instance my work in the imf on tax policy was very much engaged with trying to structure revenues from natural resources so that they accrue to the state that they're not just exploited and and for the benefit of multinationals and and vested interests who own these things which are often a small clique but but that's some of this should be um seen as benefiting uh women's programs that this can be part of a gender budgeting initiative and can be used to stimulate so that you stimulate from the ground up but that you generate revenues from where they are and natural resources for natural resource rich countries are often the best resource handle that's why it's interesting that a country like rwanda can do so well because it's not generating its revenues from natural resources or Kenya a country that's really trying to generate its revenues from a diverse set of of revenue sources you know many other things which ultimately will maybe a strength for it and you build it itself up from a smaller smaller level uh on on this issue of political participation i it's not that i don't think politics is important i think absolutely having more women in government will make a difference it's just that's something we didn't study uh in our in our in our and the problem is in a lot of developing countries looking at women's participation in parliament may be a very imperfect indicator of of their real role because you know they have very strong presidential systems and so i didn't want to get into all of that so uh and you would have to really study each country because each country may be different but how much women's majority in rwandan parliament has in terms of real influence will be different there than let's say in a country like the us where let's say the congress has you know more power to actually enact a budget you know so there's a difference in terms of the role that parliamentarians or you know members of congress will have in the country where the the executive and legislative branches have a different relationship so it's hard to say but as i said there is an interesting study where in from india where uh quotas that were imposed in empowering more women through quotas were shown to affect public budgeting in ways that were seen to to reflect the interest that women had in infrastructure in other areas where clearly they had a different set of priorities and so that and not only was that interesting study it showed that men's bias against having women politicians changed after seeing women in power they were less biased against having women once they saw that women in power could be competent so there is a literature on that i'm not saying it's not important it's just not something we tried to tackle in our project because we tried to stay focused on on the economic issues but i definitely think it has has an effect there's there's no question looking at the european experience you you can see that um as far as the the question of the gender budgeting mandate absolutely putting it into law i think is essential for making ministries of finance take these things seriously they they have to obey their laws so if you really want gender related objectives and to be taken seriously in the budget process it should be part of like like austria and ron that did put it into their organic budget laws but it's not sufficient as we saw from the experience of europe where a number of european countries quite a few of them actually have these things in their law and they still don't actually do very much it's basically ignored so you have to actually have the the interest in not just the law but the law is a good starting point and in terms of the point on agency yes i think it's very important to have engagement of women at local level of course the starting point of agency is having educated women so that's an important part of gender budgeting is enabling women to be able to represent themselves effectively and certainly having education is a good part of that but that's also the importance of having gender budgeting filtered through to every level of government so that you enable them at the local level and to a higher levels just as you you know as you could see for instance in the process that was at work even in this country where women's participation rose and certain levels of government and then they were able to represent themselves at higher levels you could try that same process in countries like what the indeed experiment was doing trying to empower women at local levels at the village level with an idea that this would then filter upwards to higher levels of government so i do think that's an important part of the process and can be built into gender budgeting initiatives so just to start for a minute from where Janet was talking about control of natural resources and the possibility of resting those revenues to the state and then what do you do with them this again the the idea Jim Boyce talked a lot about sovereign wealth funds and you can use sovereign wealth funds to say i'm going to fund you know gender equality programs or something like that you can also say i'm going to use a part of a sovereign wealth fund to have a guaranteed minimum income for every man and woman in the country separately and that you know that itself probably has some important implications for women's agency but i think that the part of where i want to go with this is to say that when we talk about sovereign wealth funds and control of the revenues from natural resource extraction we're still not talking we're talking about how you spend the money rather than how you do the gendered impact analysis of how we're extracting the resources in the first place okay and so i and that's what i think the feminist roadmap is about so it is important for example for women to have opportunities to not just have the you know the small microeconomic stuff but also the larger but it's also important you know if the woman runs the mine or the you know oil drilling in the same way that the man does that woman will get rich but but it will be very destructive to many other people so the whole question of how you do gendered impact analyses of these large processes in advance right we need to know some things about these in advance because they happen quickly at the end of an armed conflict and um you uh of course they're going to be you know different from place to place but part of what's really interesting is if like if if we think about this feminist roadmap to sustainable peace as providing some gendered impact analytic tools and the way gender budgeting could be a tool where you say here's the objective how do we make sure that our money goes to it this is almost coming from it coming to it from the opposite end and say it happened now what are the gendered impacts analysis if we transform it in these ways will it have the gendered impacts we want or will it actually have some other ones right and how do we do the thinking and analysis of that a significant part of that prior to peace processes prior to those decisions about post conflict reconstruction because if you don't the only logic that will determine how those things happen is the logics that have already been determining how they happen and the expertise that has already been determining how that happens thank you um the one thing I would add also is there are some issues in the policy and the budgeting budgetary process but there are a lot of issues that are not related to that so if we're talking about sort of the the rents or the ability to take advantage of of um of natural resources in a country a lot of it is the rulemaking around how those licenses are led and the rights are handled and some of that gets as far to micro decisions as winter and where are the meetings held and where are they posted when they're talking about how you're allocating those rights and can women get there and is it in a time in a place where they're able to go and how do you structure and and monitor that process to enable them to have a voice in decision-making and gain economic influence let's take a final couple of questions and then we'll give our panelists the response and the last word yeah hi my name is Barbara Svedberg from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom uh thank you panelists for your presentations I wanted to ask a question to Janet in particular and linking it a bit to what Carol was talking about the transformative potential uh post conflict and how it's linked to budget processes and my specific question related to gender budgeting is there a way or have you seen in your project a link to the national action plans on women peace and security so to that the national budget process and and gender budgeting need to be informed by the gender goals and the women's sort of agenda and if we look at it in not only a post conflict context but also in context where governments are concerned with with the women peace and security agenda also in the development policies are they bringing that inwards to their national processes so have you seen any cases or links between the women peace and security goals that has been approved by the government and a gender budgeting process and if so or if not do you see a potential for those two agendas to be linked thank you and we part out from IMF my question is this topic is about after gender equality needs and investment yeah gender equality need investment too and one of the discussion is about the data information of the data I think there's a significant role that we don't have to wait until we have war and peace the gender issue the information and development issue actually should be used in order to prevent conflict in the first place so this is something that they're going to get into this conflict they better know what they are talking about this is where sharing of information is very very critical thank you take a final question and then give you each an opportunity to answer the question and give any final comments my name is Simeon and I am from Afghanistan and I would like to share some of my experiences working in Afghanistan so I I work with big donors like USAID and my experience so when I when I work with these donors I believe that most of these projects are not structured to focus on gender equality in a way that is more effective especially Afghanistan or societies like Afghanistan so the project are either solidly focused on women or there are no gender sensitive majors in the project so a few examples I work with one of the biggest projects that focus on four major universities in Afghanistan I work as a gender advisor for that project and I didn't really have so the gender advisor position itself limits the how far you can go as a gender advisor so you can only give advice if they take it they take it if they don't it's okay and the argument was that it's not a gender project but it's a higher education project so I wonder how do you how do we redefine gender to make sure that every project that we implement in Afghanistan is gender sensitive it shouldn't be just the the health projects or the maternity projects or the handicraft projects so every project from security safety to construction and infrastructure should be gender sensitive and the donors have power they can do that I know that the government are not very supportive of gender that's why we have gender issues in Afghanistan but if the donors come with those indicators or with those majors and make it mandatory for every project I'm sure they will be more effective in Afghanistan and other countries like Afghanistan thank you perfect thanks we'll go down the line carol yes absolutely um so I think that this is this is so we so we what we have come to here is something very important about the relationship between two things one of them is power and the other is the capacity to actually do substantial gender analysis rather than simply say a women's issue or a women's project and I think that you know one of the issues is as Jenny pointed out having having women someplace doesn't mean that they're necessarily interested in that gender analysis or in gender equality it is incredibly important to have however the so there are there are many different places I think where if we're really interested in transformative peace building people can have impacts you want to have feminist women or men in positions of power to be making those decisions but you also need analysis so that when they make those decisions they can actually make them in a way that is transformative okay so that it's not just saying women get this project or women get this position of power but this is how we do resource extraction differently or this is how we do agricultural policy differently so you need that kind of analysis and not just to assume that if somebody's in favor of gender equality they'll get it right who needs that power well you know part of what you're pointing to of course is that the donors have a lot of power there are you know there are people throughout these processes that have a lot of power it's not just about having a woman president or a woman in the parliament or even a woman at or a you know a feminist woman at the peace table right and that's another part of what we're really interested in in the roadmap try to map who you know where are all the places where somebody could we call it critical lovers for change right where you could actually and donors have a lot of capacity to do that you know third parties and peace negotiations have a lot of capacity to do that women's movements have a lot of capacity to do that so how do we identify those things so you're asking exactly the right right questions I do feel compelled analysis is mandatory for every project in USAID and has been for several years so the question is more than just putting those mandates in place and this is true from many donors now it's about how those are those analyses are applied the extent to which they're enforced whether the modern evaluation system builds that up but I think I think we need a look to something other than just the mandate can I just add one thing it's um Cynthia Enlo says this great thing in the beginning of the book where she says you know liking women or or thinking gender equality is good is not the same as being able to do gender analysis and technical capacity and training around actually sophisticated gender analysis is another thing that people could be doing thanks Tom so the question about shouldn't we be doing this all the time not just post-conflict I think that's that's absolutely right I think this this panel took this one perspective and I think there are some unique opportunities in the post-conflict setting that there's actually one on the literature table out there Kathleen co-wrote an article with Nora Dudwick on gender and fragility ensuring a golden hour that's fantastic it kind of laying out those dynamics and and how to think about that so I would highly recommend that article great thank you Janet yeah I'll just comment on the afghan case for instance art you might find the middle eastern central asia paper interesting because we afghan was one of the two countries we highlighted morocco and afghanistan all we could find was that the gender budget initiative had survived because of the donors that was our conclusion that that they had pushed it as much as they could it wasn't clear to us that it would have survived in the absence as Carla was saying so it would be nice to see that that had taken hold in an indigenous way but it wasn't clear to us so that it was one of the countries in that region that stood out for having a reasonably effective gender budgeting initiative that we had been integrated at least at the national level into various important programs but it wasn't clear to us without all of the donor money and requirements whether it would have been sustained so that was our only question and calling it a prominent initiative because that was that wasn't the case for instance in morocco where it seemed to be more homegrown and accepted by the ministry of finance and the agent and other parts of government on barber's comment I think I haven't ever actually seen a gender budgeting initiative that tried to take into account the women peace and security I mean I think it's a really fascinating point you're making that that in some sense the gender budgeting initiatives they go to national development plans because most of people who work in this are economists and sometimes political scientists and so they go to things that are directly linked to economics that there just hasn't been that much of a but that would be a great thing to bring into account that that it's both the governments themselves who need to do this they need to bring the women peace and security into their own national development plans and then the gender budgeting which is taking those plans and putting it into the budget so it's both the government that has to integrate it into its own planning because the budget has to reflect the government's own priorities right so the government has to integrate those things but then the budget should be aware of those things and if there's a discrepancy between those things to reconcile all of these things but I think that's a really important point I mean that's what I think you know carol is trying to accomplish with this whole project is to bring together this whole idea and to say that these things aren't one in the same and that they should that like just the example you were giving I mean there's a perfect example where you know demining the roads because you think you have to get transportation but forgetting that women play the predominant role in agriculture and you know will be maimed and killed because the the mines will still be in the agricultural sector then then you have to have a budgetary program that will spend money on demining the fields as opposed to just demining the roads and a gender perspective on that looking at the different roles that men and women play in the society that's absolutely the idea of gender budgeting I mean that's a perfect example in a in a post-conflict case where the different objectives of the government from an economic development a peace and security and a gender budgeting come together in a in a nice way to serve the objectives of the society not just women or men but that that's society so that's really a great example perfect well thank you all for staying a few minutes over and please join me in thanking our panelists and we have a series of events this month for national women's history month and we hope we'll welcome you back again for the next in that series thank you so much