 I've got a very serious message, but I've lost a piece of paper that it's written on. Somebody has a Persio which is placed in the wrong place, a Persio 206. I had got a registration number written on a piece of paper, but I need to tell the owner of that car that if you ever want to see it again, you have to move it. Leonce was talking about transport. This is a point about transport and about sequencing. Fe anybody who has the piece, which is parked in the wrong place. Please move it or you may never see it again. It may be pulped or left on the edge of the city in some pound… …so this is your opportunity. And if anybody founds a piece of paper again, please give it to me. This is going to preoccupy me entirely for the next session. My name is Roger Williamson. mae'r defnyddio yn ei cyfnodd yn fwrdd yn cyfrifiad o'r llyfr hwnnw. Ond yn ystod, rydyn ni'n gofyn yn gweithio'r cyfnodd am mi'n raddwl i'r rhan o gyfnodd a fawr yn cyfnodd. Mae hyn yw'r un o'r ddweud o'r modd o'r newydd i gyd ysgrifennu wedi gweithio'n ganddyn nhw o'r ddweud. Mae hynny'n gweithio'n gweithio'n certyn gyfaf Wilton Park, y rhai cyfrifennu'r ddweud. y Llywodraeth Cymru yn y Llywodraeth, a fydd ymddir i'r bod yn ei wneud o'r awdurdodau fyddion fyddion yn y Llywodraeth Cymru, cyfnod yn y Llywodraeth, mae'n gweithio'r cyfrannu cyffredinol yn gyfnod o'r awdurdodau fyddion, dywedodd y byd yn cyfrannu cyffredinol, dywedodd y byd yn cyfrannu cyffredinol. Dyn ni'n wedi gwleidio fyddion cyffredinol. Dyn ni'n gweld nad o ran myfyrwyr. Felly, yn y llwyffan ychydig, sy'n mynd i'n meddwl ymydd i gael'r ffordd o'r llyth gael ei wneud, ac o'r llythgrifennu oedol o'r cyfnod. Mae'r elef ystod ymdordeb yn Jenny McGill, a dyna'r bod yn eitio i'r ymdweithio ac yn ein gofyn o'r dryfiad. Jenny, os ydych yn y rhan o'r lle, dyna'n bwysig oedd ymdweithio ac yn ei gael ymdweithio. Rydyn ni'n gwybod gweld glasu newydd. Rydyn ni'n gwybod acewn rhai, maeth gennym ac athwych nhw. Ond mae'r gwybodaeth acewn, rydyn ni'n gwybod, Jenny. Roedd y gwaith yn ei ddodgywedd. Rydyn ni'n gwybod bod hwn yn gweithredu y gwaith ar y llwyddechrau gyda hanfodol y cilyddion humanol. Rydyn ni'n gweithredu'r cyflwyng. Mae'r cyflwyng yw'r cyffredig, mae'r cyflwyng yw'r cyflwyng yn gweithredu'r cyflwyng, The floor is yours. Thanks, Roger. I'd also like to thank Wider and Karen Grown and the donors of the RECOM program for supporting my paper and also including me in this conference. I'm really delighted to be here and to learn so much from the other participants. I'm especially delighted to be on this panel with Roger Joelle and Nalima and also was very excited to see that the partner country representatives who are going to be speaking after lunch are all from the Asia region. I'm selfishly very pleased about that and I really look forward to their reflections and contributions. So I'd like to first give you an overview of what I was attempting to do through my paper and then highlight some of the key findings and some of my reflections on some of the findings and the detail is in the paper including an annex where I try to summarize as much as I could synthesize about the Asian donors that I was focusing on. So my intention was to try to complement some of the other RECOM studies particularly Joelle's which was looking at the Nordic donors by taking a look at the major Asian donors and their efforts to promote gender equality through their work. But in the process I also found an interesting case study in the Philippines and I thought it might be interesting to also look at the Philippine harmonized gender development guidelines that the Asian donors as well as other donors have been supporting and now trying to report under as an interesting example of harmonization being driven by the developing country in collaboration with donors. That also gave me an opportunity to look at what these Asian donors were actually doing on the ground in a specific country to contrast that with what their commitments were. I was however only looking at traditional Asian donors. I was unfortunately not able to look at the interesting south house cooperation work of some of the major Asian countries such as China and India. I also wasn't able to look at the gender equality work of non Asian donors such as Danita or Sita in Asia. And so with that let me tell you a little bit more about the work. I was first asked because I'm the first on this panel to say a couple of let's see. I think I'll skip the methodology, the gender mainstreaming. OK, so I was asked to say a couple of general words about gender mainstreaming just to frame the discussion in this panel. But I think Karen Gron also highlighted some of the broad issues around gender mainstreaming. Maybe I'll just flag a couple of things that I think are particularly relevant to the donors I was looking at. One is that although we often associate gender mainstreaming with the ECOSOC resolution that was passed in 1997 following on the Beijing conference and this notion of assessing the implications for women and men of any planning of any planned action so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. In fact when we look at where gender mainstreaming comes from it really comes from an accumulation of experiments and practices by a number of countries including donor countries in particular. And there I think Australia and New Zealand stand out as countries that were experimenting with different forms of national women's machineries, gender auditing procedures, gender budgeting as well as the Philippines which was at the forefront of much of the early work on gender mainstreaming and gender budgeting in particular. So I think it's good to look at this gender mainstream experience as really an accumulation of experience over time that is still very much ongoing. And I think as Karen noted one of the common approaches to gender mainstreaming to try to implement this is through a two track or a twin track approach and I certainly found that in the work of the Asian donors. Also the various reviews and evaluations of the experience of gender mainstreaming of individual donors or of donors, governments and NGOs in general have highlighted pretty consistently some key factors that are considered to be key ingredients for successful promotion of gender equality. And I clustered these around five themes for my analysis of the Asian donors. One was looking at strong leadership expertise and accountability to the extent to which that was in place. Another was the implementation of various effective procedures and practices to try to integrate a gender perspective and gender equality concerns across different forms of development assistance. The third was different capacity building measures both for staff and development partners around gender equality. Fourth adequate financial resources which Karen mentioned and then timely monitoring, evaluation and learning. And so I'll now just touch on a few of my findings around at least four of these common themes. But to first say a word about the donors I was looking at, as you'll see it's a fairly interesting and heterogeneous group and it gave me an opportunity to draw some interesting comparisons and contrasts. I was looking at regional development bank ADB as well as four OECDAC donor countries. So what I had was a mix of both bilateral donors and a development bank, both old and new OECDAC members with Koika being the newest, Korea and Koika being the newest. Asian donors that were located both in East Asia and the Pacific and donors using different mixes of aid modalities including technical assistance, grants and loans. I think it's also worth noting that three of the bilateral donors have recently undergone major restructuring and the one that's most current is AusAids. Current merger into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. And I think this highlights one issue that I'll come back to at the end about the challenge of trying to consistently promote gender equality through periods of organizational change and political change in particular. And I think here I would also say that my observations in Asia are very consistent with what Kai was discussing, which had to do with the importance of a history of domestic support for gender equality and the influence that has over a country's development assistance program. We see that in the strong performance certainly until recent dates of both Australia and New Zealand, not surprising given their long histories of commitment to gender equality. Also the importance of which parties empower the restructuring of New Zealand aid and now currently Australian aid are under conservative governments, which appear to be trying to roll back some of the, certainly some of the development policies that have been in place under previous Labour governments. So looking at, let's see, I think I'll skip over this, to the policy commitments of the Asian donors. I think it's interesting to see that all but one now has a standalone gender equality policy. New Zealand under the current government had basically replaced their gender equality policy with a more general commitment to seeing gender as one of several cross-cutting themes. And all of the gender equality policies in place, as Karen was mentioning, reflect of support for both normative and instrumental arguments for promoting gender equality and they all reflect to some extent this two-track approach that Karen mentioned. In terms of gender equality leadership, I think it's important to note that the Asian donors, like I think development organisations elsewhere, have experienced fairly mixed periods of political leadership on gender equality, weak or sporadic experiences. But I'd note that at least in the cases of Ausaid and until recently, and Asian Development Bank, there has been some recent improvement. In Ausaid until the recent merger with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, there was a global ambassador for women and girls representing Australia and also a gender advocate, a strong high-level gender advocate or two, several in the management of Ausaid. And both ADB and Ausaid senior gender advisers have recently been participating in more management-level decision-making management-level committees, which has certainly had a positive support or positive impact on the leverage they're able to exert. In terms of gender expertise in the organisations, there's definitely a commitment across all the organisations to having some number of dedicated gender experts, but there's quite a lot of variation, even now, in the numbers in place. Right now, in Cwica and in New Zealand, there's only one dedicated gender specialist in place to oversee and coordinate all of the gender equality work of the organisation. The other organisations all have much larger teams in place. But there are different numbers and different allocations of gender experts between, say, centrally located teams, and then gender experts distributed through either other departments at headquarters or in the country offices. I would also note that the different donors see different roles played by some of the gender experts in other parts of the organisation. All of the donors all recognise a critical role that the central gender experts play, but AusAid also relies heavily on a gender focal point network. ADB had been relying heavily, and still is, on a strong cadre of national gender specialists working in its resident missions to really localise, contextualise its commitments in its loan projects. In terms of accountability, all of the organisations have a mix of internal and external accountability mechanisms in place. On the internal side, all but New Zealand has a gender equality action plan that is driving, at a corporate level, driving the organisation's commitment to gender equality with a variety of goals or targets. ADB, among all of them, has perhaps gone the farthest in making commitments in terms of hard targets for gender mainstreaming in its loan operations. At the moment, it has committed, and this is in its publicly available annual report on its development effectiveness, to mainstream gender equality, very specifically defined, at least 45% of all of its loan projects. In terms of external accountability, I find it interesting that all but New Zealand have some form of external gender forum, council, committee, that meets periodically with the management and with staff to review the progress that the agency has made and to make recommendations for improving the organisation's performance on gender equality. In Japan, there is a very feisty parliamentary caucus that also scrutinises the gender responsiveness of Japanese ODA. It seems to me, from my observation, that all of these external advisory groups do play an important role in keeping gender equality on the agenda of the organisations, especially through periods of change, of restructuring and introduction of new business processes or political change. In terms of process, all of the organisations, as you might expect, have some mix of process requirements to try to mainstream gender equality through the organisation's operations. I won't go into a lot of detail, there's more in my paper, but I'll just highlight a couple of points. In terms of engendering country strategies, ADB is the one of the donors I looked at that actually requires a country gender strategy to be in place to accompany every new or updated country programme. In terms of design, I just highlight some of the work of ADB and AusAid. AusAid has introduced, and hopefully will continue, even in the reorganisation, a quality and entry reporting system that requires some explanation of what the commitment of the new initiative is to gender equality, whereas ADB, through these gender targets and a requirement that all projects that meet this target have a very specific gender action plan that includes specific strategies and targets, gender analysis, sex-disagregated data for monitoring purposes, is also trying to put some meat on the concept of gender integration in project design. But all of the organisations I looked at acknowledged that they're really falling down on implementation, and I think this is a theme that will probably come out in other discussions today. In this area, I again would point to what AusAid and ADB have been trying to do to address this as just a couple of examples. AusAid has a gender equality and implementation requirement for all major projects. So, on an annual basis, project leaders have to be reporting on the extent to which the project is actually contributing to gender equality in the country through its implementation. ADB now has recently adopted a target, not just on the design of projects, but also on the achievement of intended gender equality results in completed projects, and that is driving a number of changes in the way ADB conducts reviews, the way completion reports on projects are carried out, and certainly the way evaluations of projects are carried out. In terms of training and capacity development, as you might expect, the organisations all have a variety of approaches to trying to mainstream and understanding of gender issues and to provide more specific training on gender equality and gender integration to their staffs. On internal issues, I'll just flag some of the work that AusAid had been doing that, again, one would hope will continue through the reorganisation. One was the development of e-learning tools to try to reach a broader number of staff, including staff and consultants and other partners that might be located out of Australia and less accessible to trainings that were being offered there. Also, I found quite interesting that through the general work process review, the AusAid gender specialists were looking to expand the range of career streams for people interested in promoting gender equality through their work, so that at one level there would be continual training, capacity development for gender experts, but there would also be another track to help project managers, people working at an operational level who didn't see themselves as gender experts, nonetheless have a stronger grounding in gender analysis and understanding of what were appropriate and effective ways to achieve gender equality through their work, as well as more general gender awareness programme for all staff. On the external side, I would just flag some work that ADB has done to try to reach out to project managers, and in this case, because ADB is making loans to governments, the project managers are government officials, to try to encourage and promote gender champions who are project managers, especially in more challenging sectors, infrastructure sectors in particular. So what ADB has been supporting over several years now are annual peer learning workshops that bring together the project managers from a sector, say water supply and sanitation, from several countries to share their experiences, what's worked, what hasn't, and that has had a nice catalytic effect on number of these gender champions who are managing ADB-funded projects and have done follow-up experience, sharing with colleagues in other ministries and in other countries. I think I'll skip financial resources, talk a little bit about evaluations and learning, since these are points that Karen also raised at the outset. I can see in the experience of the Asian donors a greater attention to the need to do more rigorous evaluation. There were a number of evaluations, in fact, of gender quality programs underway at the time I was interviewing gender advisors and collecting information, but also the need for more rapid, informal types of monitoring and cross-checking, and here I would just flag the gender program stocktakes that AusAid has been conducting as well as rapid gender assessments that ADB had been conducting of selected projects. This suggests that there's a need for a mix of monitoring and evaluation activities to try to keep gender equality work on track and try to learn lessons that can be incorporated and improve programming going forward. In the area of research, I would also just flag what I found very interesting and impressive work that AusAid had been doing to try to incorporate the results of research in its gender equality programming, with research institutes and universities and commissioning specific research projects. This was particularly influential in AusAid's work on violence against women in the Pacific, and as a result of AusAid's support, along with other development agencies and partners of a number of prevalence surveys in Asia and specifically the Pacific, AusAid was able to make a commitment and was actually forced because of the results of these evaluations to take action, develop an action plan, and make a large funding commitment to fight violence against women in the Pacific and more broadly in Asia. We will have to see with the pending aid cuts in Australia the extent to which those commitments survive. Hopefully they will. I think I'll just say a few words about these harmonized... Yes, yes. The harmonized GAD guidelines in the Philippines, there's more detail in my paper, but I think this is a really interesting example of an attempt to collaborate involving the Philippine Commission on Women, UNEDA, the National Economic and Planning Authority, and the donor network on gender development in the Philippines to try to develop some common principles for integrating gender equality in their programs and then a scoring system that's linked to those principles that then gives rise to an annual reporting system both by the donors and by key government agencies. I did find that Australia and New Zealand were the donors I was looking at that seemed to be making the most effective use of these guidelines and I think there's room for greater use by other donors in the Philippines and perhaps other ways that these guidelines could act as a model for similar initiatives elsewhere. I'll be happy to talk more about that later. Generally, I found through this quick review of the work of several Asian donors a number of challenges that I think are shared by other donors. One is the challenge of trying to maintain a focus on gender equality through dramatic political change and organizational restructurings. Another was the challenge of trying to address gender equality issues through a very heavily economic-focused aid program, especially loan projects. But here, I think ADBs experience and experience in more effectively mainstreaming gender equality in its economic development projects, especially in infrastructure projects and provide some lessons for some of the bilateral donors such as Japan and Korea that have really not been doing much in this area so far. I think I've already flagged what I consider some of the interesting experiments and innovations that might be of interest to donors elsewhere, including research, the greater use of research to inform programming by AusAid, harnessing of results-based management approaches by ADB through setting very specific targets with very specific definitions on gender mainstreaming and specific processes for making that happen. And then this harmonization experiment in the Philippines that I think does merit greater attention and perhaps application elsewhere. And I think with that I may leave the policy implications, Roger, because I'm sure those will come up in discussion later. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. I'd like to ask Joel to come up to the podium, please. And Finn has now magically found the piece of paper with the person about the car. The Peugeot 206 XD 47 636 XD 47 636 must be moved. I'm sorry about that, to lower the tone after such a wonderful presentation and before another one. Do you want to resume here or sit here? I don't mind. Right. Joel is the next presenter. Joel Malochili Nanivatso. She's been threatening to cut her presentation short, but I give instructions not to, in spite of the time pressure we're under. And Joel has done a fantastic job in pulling things together for this event and also working on the project, the RECOM project on this subject as the gender specialist on the RECOM staff, the wider staff. I'd also remind you, Jenny made reference to it. The presentations are on the memory stick and so this is a wonderful thing to take home and use. It's a fantastic innovation. I won't take any more time. Joel, please use your time to the full. Yes. Thank you, Rogers. And I would like first to thank you all for coming to this meeting and also thank Karen for joining our team at UniWide. My paper is gender mainstreaming in the Nordic technology, which is co-creator with Lucy Scott of Oversys Development Institute. The overall goal of this paper was to assess the gender mainstreaming effort of three Nordic agencies, than the Finnish MFA and CIDA. What we have tried to do which is different of most gender mainstreaming analysis is to look at both the ad quarter level as well as the embassy level because we found out that gender mainstreaming is not only about the process, the internal reorganisation of an agency is more about the outcome, and where you find the outcome is through interventions. Most interventions are designed, conceived, designed, implemented at the embassy level. And that has been forgotten. So we have tried to do that. And why just those three Nordic agencies? Because they are considered as being pioneered in gender equality through the work of Esther Bobo-Serap, the feminist movement. As well as some high-level participation at the UN conference for gender equality. So I will not talk about gender mainstreaming because Jenny has already mentioned that. I will go through the logic that we have adopted for this paper. And our results, we have looked at six aspects of gender mainstreaming, but here for the sake of time, I will only look at a few, I think two or three of them. You are welcome to read the paper. And then in this section with a funny title, we have tried to look at past evaluation, see what was the issue in the past evaluation, and then we have asked the gender advisor how they have resolved those issues, or if those issues are still persistent, or what are they thinking about to solve some of those issues. And then I will go to the policy application and then some concluding remarks. We have opted for a semi-structure in interviews with two gender advisors in each of those Nordic agencies, as well as reviewing some gender mainstreaming literature and some policy documents. So we came up with a questionnaire which is available, basically divided in three parts. The internal organization, the external operational procedure, as well as the project evaluation. So what we did for the last component of the questionnaire, we asked the gender advisor to understand the questionnaire to one focal point in one of the embassies, and we let them decide which of the country should answer the questionnaire and also pick the project that they would like to answer those questions. So that's what we did. So in terms of commitment, it's a fact that those three countries, they are highly committed to gender equality, and that is translated in terms of gender equality being a priority area or a cross-gathing issue. And that's what we found out that in the longest history, they have switched those gender equality without being a gender priority area or a cross-gathing issue. Why the switch was really uncertain? Why was the motivation for switching from one or the other? And that has been translated in the two-track approaches, both mainstream gender equality in the operation as well as in strategic and targeted intervention. But in the last decade or so, they started moving through to a white-based approach, and most of the gender advisors have actually admitted that they are still grappling with what is a white-based approach, particularly in terms of results or implementation on the ground, because gender equality has a much broader context than just the white-based approach. And that also has made them look at gender equality as a human right. And with that also came a strong focus on the soft sector. For instance, health, education and water, not really in terms of agriculture and infrastructure and economic and productive sector. So looking at their budgets for gender equality using party or male gender policy maker, we see that gender is well funded. I mean, if you ignore all of the issues, but how they come up with this value, you can see at first value, gender is pretty well funded. But that does not say anything about the quality of the programme. Where do those money go? And what is the progress accomplished with this money? And also you also need to make a difference between budgets for special intervention as well as for integrating gender into programmes. And none of the Nordic agency have a budget for gender streaming per se. So we asked them the question, what is the solution in order for us to really relate the funding to the progress. And also this is gender budgeting. That came up from our discussion with the gender adviser. And now these are some of the results that we found. In terms of human resources, both at the headquarter and also in the embassy, there are a difference. While the Finnish MFA has only one gender adviser, they need to see that they have several gender advisers, but they are highly decentralized agencies. And they are referred to either team gender or gender app. And one of the difficulties for managing this big team of gender that are also in the embassy is the timing. How can you get everybody in one spot to give training? And that has been a constant particularly for SIDA. For the focal points here, the Finnish MFA doesn't have focal points in the embassy. What they do once a project is identified, they will send the project for gender analysis to the gender adviser. Where they see that they need to have focal points in their embassy. But they are not gender experts. And they are only supposed to have 20 hours to work on gender streaming. And that particularly for SIDA is basically depending on the focal points that are working on a particular intervention. But the embassy is the one particularly for the intervention. They are the ones that are identified and they implement the intervention. But for each of those interventions, there is the gender adviser in the headquarter to do the gender analysis or quality assessment to make sure that gender concerns are included in the intervention. And for that they have come up with practical tools for gender mainstream. But there is still a lot of commitment and evaporation because in the headquarter the gender adviser are really committed to include gender equality. But when it goes down to the embassy, it basically depends on the focal points skills as well as time to make sure that gender concerns are included in the project. In terms of monitoring and evaluation, they are still lacking on that. Many projects are not evaluated. And wherever they are evaluated, the outcomes are not evaluated in terms of gender, sensitive indicator or designated in terms of sex. So what are the past, present and future of gender mainstreaming? The issue that rose was human resources. There is still this issue is very persistent. And for the last five years, the issue has even been more prominent due to staff cutback for SIDA and Danida. And that has made the gender adviser to be more generalist than specialist. Why? Because now they need to acquire skills that will allow them to move from one sector to being able to take on the task as required. And there is also the issue that is coming up more, is the priority of our laws and the priorities we are switching. And we ask them the question. So what do you think is the solution? Because taking into account the development problem are changing through the decades and the focus of foreign agencies is changing with it. What do you think is the solution to priority switching? And there also was incentive and commitment. Basically, there is need more incentive for the gender adviser to stick with gender equality instead of going to other priorities. And in terms of monitoring and evaluation, many past evaluation have shown that their focus was on practical, instead of the structural needs of women. And there is also the issue of gender sensitive and ticker. But one approach that we discussed during our interview, which is most of the gender adviser said it was more effective even than gender mainstreaming in the context of changing ads and the nature of partnership is policy dialogue. And that works very well with budget support because they are a financial incentive. And then during our interview, we found out that SIDA was moving towards private sector and that we will discuss in the lemas paper. And they are also using more budget support and as a matter of fact, because at the time of the interview, they were reviewing the strategies for gender equality. And they came up that they were moving. They started to decide that they will put more funding in the global funds that through budget support. And also the Finnish MFA also have at the time of the interview that they also have decided to give more support to women's political network. So what are the policy implications and the conclusion of the paper? One of the policy implications is incentive. Incentive is a matter for making sure that the gender adviser is staying focused on the issue of women and then gender mainstream. But that also depends on the level of commitment. For accountability, we did not find anything. We think that is not only about incentive and commitment, but as well as accountability. What do you do needs to be taken care of? To be taken care of at the end of the day. And the result agenda is an opportunity to maintain the focus on gender. Because there has been talk to go away from gender streaming. One alternative, I think, is the result agenda. But then we also need to make clear gender sensitive indicators and also make gender equality to all the development outcomes. We also found out that because of the changing partnership as well as the involvement of many actors in foreign aid, development agencies are not necessarily the starting point for a good gender streaming investigation. Thank you. Joel, thank you very much. Nilima Gulrajani is going to be the third speaker. She's based at Oxford University. My old university. The university is now doing much more interesting things than when I was there. Nilima, do you would like to speak from the podium? The three speakers' presenters will join me here on the panel. We'll have some time for questions. A couple of the subjects. There was a nice link at the end of Joel's paper with the private sector and global funds. Foundations, there are many new actors coming into the territory, not just the donors. I look forward to hearing about it. Thank you, Roger. Thank you UNU wider for the invitation. Can everyone hear me okay? I realize I'm the last presentation between you and lunch. The session is supposed to end at 12.15. I'm going to try and be as brief as possible. That's often quite hard for an academic though. I have my stopwatch here. Hopefully I won't go beyond the 12 minutes that I had. I'm here today to talk about corporate actors and pretty much the linkage between public sector aid agencies and corporate actors through a new aid modality and you might want to put in parentheses challenge funds in particular. I'm interested in the implications of these new funds for gender specifically. I had two motivating questions. The first really was what is this aid modality and how are gender challenges integrated within the modality? How are gender challenges and development mainstreamed within this relatively new aid modality that seeks to promote public-private partnership? Secondly really was to try and address the implications for traditional aid actors or donors themselves. How should they be steering their growing engagement with the corporate sector to achieve robust gender equality objectives? Basically the argument here is that the rise of corporate actors in development has consequences for donors for the way donors organise and manage themselves and also mainstream their gender objectives. I should say here that this is very early days for analytical engagement on this question around challenge funds in particular. The global fund is more widely studied but probably doesn't fit the definition of a classic challenge fund either. So this is quite exploratory research at this stage. Just to briefly contextualise, some people have talked about a quiet corporate revolution in the world of aid. Private donors channel considerable sums of money to development and one estimate by the OECD claimed over 55 billion in 2012. An interesting paper by Rogerson and Carras published by the ODI suggested that private giving in aid is a major disruptor for the donor aid community and without aid adaptation these aid agencies risk irrelevance. Arguably in the second point public sector and to some extent NGOs are playing a defensive game here. They tend to be viewed as slow, bureaucratic, inefficient, largely supply driven in contradistinction to the corporate sector that is agile, flexible, client centred. And so donors themselves seem to be reacting to that, that sort of lack of credibility or that seriating situation of credibility by increasingly trying to partner with this sector. Just briefly, tracing the historical evolution of corporate actors in development I sort of identify four periods in the paper. The first being sort of the traditional economic understanding of businesses and tools for growth. Wealth creation, employment creation, largely driven by trickle-down economics understandings and the positive externalities that a growing business community has for growth rates and development as a consequence of that. The second period seems to evolve into more of a notion that corporates themselves potentially have create negative externalities that need to be minimized by voluntary codes of conduct that can address and mitigate those externalities whether that be on human rights issues or environmental issues for example. So here we had a more proactive engagement to enhance perhaps, well actually we evolved from negative extradality mitigation to something more proactively trying to enhance the positive externalities of business and it's in that phase that I think we moved to this third period of inclusive business. We're here, businesses are no longer simply tools for growth but actually agents of development themselves and the term inclusive business has been talked about here where poverty is defined or is seen as an opportunity for both businesses as well as for the poor. And the paper sort of goes into more detail in terms of that phase and what that really means but largely the main point here is that there has been criticism of this phase, this inclusive business term as basically the corporate sector exploiting the poor, trying to sell to the poor in such a way that they're encouraging consumption of products that perhaps aren't as helpful for their needs or frankly just not appropriate for their needs. Again, the last phase which we are talking about now is social business or BOP bottom of the pyramid 2.0 where here the poor are seen not as consumers of goods and services necessarily but more actively as producers, as partners with corporates, very much involved in production networks and really the poor are seen as having opportunities to enhance their own capabilities in supply chains for example. And here this phase is increasingly talking about corporates potentially having to sacrifice profits to achieve development and social aims whereas BOP 1.0 was very much about win-win situations I think there's a sense in which BOP 2.0 recognises there are potential trade-offs between commercial profitability and social impact. Defining challenge funds, there are no clear definitions and they're largely driven by examples of challenge funds but I think you can attribute certain characteristics to challenge funds and most importantly this notion of partnership between these two communities. Importantly though often defined by third party contractors so you find consultancy companies, PWCs and Accentures often brokering these partnerships and I put business mainly because there are challenge funds that do work with non-governmental organisations in particular but the vast majority do focus on the linkage between donors and business Another characteristic is the innovative potential that's possible. So there is a notion here that challenge funds stimulate innovation thinking outside of the box in development and they reduce the risk of the uncertainty when wanting to engage with innovation in this space. The third characteristic is its ability to leverage additional investments so often challenge funds are based on a premise that the business partner needs to provide match funding often in a 50-50 ratio so it can encourage additional funds to the development intervention and then lastly although perhaps I should have put that first it's a competitive process some are more competitive than others as we'll see in the two cases I look at but the idea here is you select the best opportunities through some form of competitive mechanism and that means that there's also a clear exit strategy for the donors. There's no commitment necessarily to fund on a second round or a third round. I think what's important though is that the rationale for these challenge funds are twofold. One is a more instrumental rationale that donors can benefit from this kind of engagement by leveraging the expertise of corporates by resource sharing and by perhaps deflecting some of the competitive pressures that I mentioned exist in the donor community. Corporates can benefit they get access to some amount of patient capital patient capital doesn't need to return in two years sometimes at a better rate so it's grant financing in many cases in most cases and also that corporates can benefit from donor networks in the markets that they're engaged with and their contacts through intermediaries, partners NGOs working at that level and so on. The normative rationale however is also really interesting and could perhaps be the subject of another study entirely. My sense is that this is inserting business thinking in the aid world and that's sort of viewed to be a good thing largely and we can question that I suppose and that it also legitimizes business as a caring actor in the space as well. So there are normative and instrumental benefits and just briefly, they aren't necessarily new so we've had prize funds that have existed in development enterprise development funds so some question is to its newness as well as a mechanism. Okay, the paper goes into these two examples and I'm not going to have a chance to get into very much detail on them but the main difference is the one on the left of business innovation facilities funded by DFID Innovations Against Poverty funded by Swedish CEDA Main differences between the two the UK approach, the BIF is very much technical assistance window they very much claim that they're not providing cash finance to business it's about choosing particular organizations that face very specific constraints understanding of their market for example and financing a study or bringing in consultants to do some analysis for them. Innovations Against Poverty is very much about a cash financing window for specific businesses. The DFID example also is not as selective projects are solicited largely through the informal networks between country managers and the eight agencies employees. CEDA is a very transparent competitive selection process geographic scope, the UK facility is defined itself in its pilot phase on five countries and Swedish CEDA has not defined geographic scope. So these are just some highlights of the window again all these tables are in the paper but you can see the UK example focus largely on the five countries the IAP has a much more wider geographic dispersion but the IAP also provides less funds less projects mainly because they are providing cash finance so larger spend per project as opposed to the UK model. Sectors that are financed predominantly agriculture, secondly energy the other is a large category mainly because they are either identified or cross sectoral. Modes of involvement so how are the poor involved in these projects interestingly somewhat even across the producer consumer dimension less so as distributors and the paper gets into the relative distribution between the IAP and BIF projects and why that might be the case. I won't go into that here but really for this audience I suppose it's the intersections between this engagement with the corporate world and the intersection of that with gender that is interesting for you I imagine and for me. I have a quote here from the OECD mainstreaming gender equality report suggesting that it is difficult to so it's not surprising that these efforts to harmonize and promote gender sensitive dialogue on new aid modalities is challenging and I think this comparative case study while early days for both initiatives suggests or is in support of that statement. Now I know Karen's comments initially were sort of questioning mainstreaming suggesting it potentially invisibilizes gender but the reality I think is that donors as some of the other presentations earlier suggested are committed to these cross cutting horizontal initiatives and they often define gender as that and so the paper is premised on the view that donors are seeking to mainstream gender at the same time as they have these initiatives on the private sector side so how do the two interact and I study this in two dimensions one is how do they select projects in both those challenge funds and how do gender criteria come into the project selection phase and then how do gender criteria input into the performance assessment of both those of both those windows and so all donors find this challenging that's very clear from the earlier presentations briefly though in the DFID and CEDA case what we see is this tension that was also identified by Karen between instrumental and rights based approaches and evaluations and the current work that's being done suggests as much that there are these tensions between these two dimensions so the results then of this very exploratory research how these gender criteria interact with challenge funds in terms of the project selection the BIF the UK model doesn't have clear eligibility criteria that look at gender as I said it's not an open competition proposals are solicited through an informal network kind of based approach by contrast the Swedish approach does have clear eligibility criteria defined on the basis of gender in terms of the overall objectives of gender objectives that are defined in the challenge fund the BIF doesn't really address that at all they define their objectives largely in terms of scale and scale is defined largely in terms of reach so directly being able to reach a poor person or directly being able to reach a poor person whether female or male is really an objective and the focus for the BIF is largely on the operational constraints of business themselves so what they're looking for specific obstacles that these businesses are facing that are preventing their commercial growth and that is the large driver for selecting these companies on the IAP side what's interesting is there are sort of very specific gender objectives that are defined on both the output and outcome levels and also more interestingly perhaps is the interest in systematic effects or systemic effects sorry so how is the wider structural constraints on gender actually addressed through this particular project which was very interesting to see I didn't expect that types of businesses targeted so the BIF very much sits within the BOP 1.0 phase where we're looking at corporates who have strong commercial drivers and their development goals are I would say secondary some might dispute that but on the basis of the portfolio analysis I think the development sits very much secondarily to the commercial viability of the ventures in contrast to the IAP which does seem to seek out businesses more aligned with the second phase of bottom of the pyramid approaches in terms of performance assessment looking at the contributions to development and how these initiatives define development additionality within the UK context there doesn't seem to be any focus on gender within that space the IAP neither but you might argue that the IAP has stronger criteria for selection phase such that potential additionality that's achieved in terms of performance assessment could potentially be far greater I should say that performance assessment on both these initiatives is still ongoing there has been no major evaluation of either of these initiatives to date the BIF pilot is just finished so I have to caveat all this with these are still early days for both these initiatives on the metrics again largely quantitatively based in the BIF indicator based just to give you an example the BIF funding window is only 3.1 million pounds the BIF claims that 1.9 million people are reached and so when I asked what does reach really mean as well they potentially bought a product for example that was being funded by this initiative so it's very indicator based and very much defined on that level of scale really yep yes yeah okay so that's basically the news headlines you can read more about this I suppose but it's early days for it last slide policy recommendations for donors so going back to my second question within challenge funds how should donors steer their engagement to achieve gender results given this new window and I think one needs to think very carefully about the comparative advantages of donors and corporates should corporates be doing development should donors be outsourcing this elements of the development work to corporates why are challenge funds advantageous as a mechanism for achieving this type of development goal so thinking through carefully the comparative advantages of these two groups are we potentially de-skilling donor agencies by outsourcing this kind of work to corporates so that there are a whole host of questions that are raised there I think there's also a sense in which we need to be clear and ambitious with our gender objectives within the project selection phase specifically so we can develop baseline indicators that can then be used throughout the project cycle to especially assess impact there are implications for who the businesses that we partner with are it seems that if you have if you engage with businesses that are more ambitious on the development front one is likely to achieve higher performance on gender goals although obviously these are all caveated you might want to also think about how you integrate and ensure consistency across these cross cutting horizontal issues of private sector development and gender you want to engage corporate actors more proactively on gender so including on the performance assessment phase so for many corporates the monitoring and evaluation on the development side was really seen to be more of a burden than anything else their imperative was really on the profitability of their commercial venture and then the role of third party implementers interestingly in both these initiatives it's PWC who are the third party contractors here what kind of M&E work are they doing what's their role question whether their focus as a consulting company is largely on the commercial concerns of business so how do they get there at the interface between the donors and business and that's the full reference for the paper if you're interested great, thank you very much come and join us and Jenny if you could come and join us I've got a special dispensation from Finn to take three or four questions and pinch a little of the lunch break and thank you very much for registering if we could have a microphone over here please perhaps two more people who wish to address a question for myself Karen here and yes I don't know you yet but we will take you as well thank you, please thank you, my name is Taria Repen and I am Ambassador for General Equality in Finland a couple of questions to all of the presentations which were very interesting first of all to Mrs. McGill I just wonder why did you omit handling China and India in this respective because in my view you confused a little bit of different agencies and international institute it's quite valid of course to talk about what Australians and Japanese and a couple of others are doing in their donor activities but in my view Asian Development Bank is very much international institute Finland is member of that and we are very well aware of their programmes and we act supporting gender issues to be widely taken up in Asian Development Bank so I think it is a bit misleading conceptionally if you analyse all of them but the question of China what do you say about that because China of course as we all know is a problem in many ways but according to our experience they have now shown a lot of interest into gender questions on policy level and all in all they pretend to be a donor as well they just have this dual approach of being a leading country of development world when it's profitable for them for policy reasons and my second if we want to hear the answers to the questions the questions have to be short please sorry, the second one is of course a shorter one when it concerns the Nordic donors where did you forget Icelandic because they are members of duck and they are very how should I say operative also in the aid issues even though they have small population the picture which you gave about Finland is a bit misleading because in Finland development issues are part of our foreign policy and therefore development agencies there is no special agency but these issues are dealt in the foreign ministry which is again trying to implement the policy of the government on gender issues so I would say that number of gender advisers who is here doesn't matter because she's extremely qualified, thank you thank you very much Karen, short and sweet please thank you to everybody very interesting presentations this is a question for Ninema I think it's a very interesting paper I think that part of the one of the issues that I think is interesting is the question of the tension does exist between right space and this instrumentalism but one of the things that I think has been attention and this interesting in this is whether you can get results with the private sector entry in ways that you can't get results and whether the progress would be faster because of that, because they're nimble and so forth but it raises all kinds of tensions there because the questions of all the way that you do that and whether these interventions are rights respecting is where I think some of the issues are. I have a second more interesting question for me maybe not for you and this is meant to be very friendly not hostile but what does gender criteria mean I don't know what that means this is one of the questions when I moved to AID from academic life and I would see gender considerations and gender criteria I don't think that's very helpful I think the question is when you say are there gender criteria as part of selection or as part of the objectives I think it's more helpful to reframe this in the sense of when you're talking about women or women owned businesses you need to say that but if you're talking about the profitability or earnings of women owned businesses but what is a gender criteria doing something like changing the segregation of firms across industries is it doing something else so I really think this is an example for this community of how we might start to think about doing business differently first by starting with our language if you could pass it to your neighbour and please introduce yourself hi I'm Alicia I'm from the World Bank and I have a question for Nilima as well which is did you think about framing your work in terms of looking at quotas it seems more of in terms of looking at quotas and I think it slightly picks up on Karen's last point so that the selection is either in terms of a quota of number of firms which are women owned or in the sectors which employ women that would seem to have much more traction when you're dealing with private sector kinds of activities ok my instructions to the panel pretend you're politicians just answer the questions you like Nilima I wouldn't answer anything can we have the microphone please ok I think the first point was more comment so I'm not going to address address that but the second question about what gender criteria means and I think perhaps the best way to address that is through an example of what I mean by it because it isn't defined very clearly even in the documentation that I had access to so there was one business financed by the IAP for example which was or trying to get teenage girls gave them access to reusable sanitary products so Ruby Cup was the project and the argument there is if you could make get access to those girls of this product you would reduce infection rates because often teenage girls were using cotton that was dirty or not changing frequently and so on and so I spoke to the owner of that particular the founder of that particular initiative and it seemed clear that the criteria by which she was selected didn't have necessarily how many women were affected but very much driven by a notion that this could potentially be life changing in terms of attendance at school for example in terms of not having to sell sexual favours to have access to buy disposable sanitary hygiene products so and the IAP seemed to have caught on to that kind of more systemic potential impacts of that particular project I would love to reframe it along the lines that you suggested the data isn't there at this point but we could have a conversation about how one might get to that data and I guess it's related to that point that the data isn't there just yet it's you know quote as yes could be potentially a very interesting way to look at it number of firms owned by women but the donor agencies don't disaggregate project finance on the basis of that information and I didn't have the ability to go into exploratory research but it's an interesting potential next stage for this Jenny you left out India and China how could you? That was really unfair of me so thank you very much for the question on why I included Asian Development Bank selfishly I was very familiar with their practice as I worked there I must confess that up front but I also thought that some of ADB's recent achievements in terms of gender mainstreaming especially in economic sectors also held valuable lessons especially for bilateral donors such as Japan and Korea which also provide most of their donor's development assistance through loans and I think that common aid modality was a useful excuse for including admittedly an international organization so I agree I did muddle and stretch the definition a bit as to why I didn't include India and China it was really a matter of time the awareness that just getting data on the practice of those organizations would be more challenging but it's definitely something that I'm interested in exploring further but I think then it would be useful to look more broadly at Asian developing countries because I think historically countries such as Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand have been providing south-south cooperation support to other developing countries on gender quality issues so I think I would want to broaden it and not just look at the big players but more broadly at the role that developing countries have been playing on gender quality both domestically and in supporting others So Anjol, you left out Iceland and you need to make friends with the Finns over lunch and I left out also nowhere so I was expecting this question from somebody from nowhere to come and say why did you leave us out so the easy also that it was just that I had an opportunity with Dan Edd I needed to see that and finish so it was just a matter of where do I have people to enter to where are you from I needed to find out first the people to meet them and so on but with Dan Edd and see that and finish as a matter of fact for the finish interview we have invited them for a coffee break basically so it was during the coffee break because we are just close to each other so mea culpa for that mea culpa to nowhere and in terms of the finish that my paper is misleading I do not think that my paper is misleading because we have referred to the fact that the finish MFA is not a development agency per se so I did not have the chance to say it here but in the paper we have talked about the structure and in terms of first of all my paper is not an assessment on the effectiveness of those three agencies it has nothing to do with what PIVI does or doesn't do so I can I will I will resolve my comment for that it's not an assessment to the effectiveness it's just a way to show what they have done and how they are different or similar thank you very much so you can see the panel of perfect researchers more research needs to be done it's always the answer with researchers thank you all very much for showing us your work in progress thank you very much indeed I'd also like to do two more things a book review which is feminists in development organisations if you want to survive as a woman organisation you need to read this book it's fantastic on how to be effective in these agendas it's by Rosalind Ibin and Laura Turkey I'll make sure it goes in the reference goes in the report it's feminists in development organisations changed from the margins so I strongly recommend that that was my homework before coming here and now before lunch you're going to be animated and I've also got to tell you that lunch is downstairs at reception where you came in so please animate us in Recom UNU Wider's Global Network of Researchers compile and assess the best evidence on the impact of foreign aid here we take a closer look at how it works to promote gender equality and women's empowerment over the last decade most donors have made strong commitments to improving the lives of women and girls these commitments have translated into a four-fold increase in foreign aid toward gender equality and women's empowerment increasing from 6.5 billion US dollars in 2002 to 25.5 billion dollars in 2011 a substantial part of this aid has been directed to the education and health sectors for instance education and health receive more than half the total bilateral aid whereas by contrast the agriculture and rural development sectors have received one fifth of the total aid allocated to support economic and productive sectors there are encouraging signs that foreign aid has reduced gender inequality and benefited women and girls an increase in foreign aid is associated with an improvement in both the human development and the gender inequality indexes specifically aid appears to be effective in reducing maternal deaths as well as helping to close the gender gap in youth literacy larger amounts of aid is given to countries that grant more extensive rights to women increased aid to women's organizations has had a positive effect on women's political empowerment in the Middle East and in North Africa furthermore initiatives that use an economic entry point to empower women have spillover effects improving women's self confidence and decision making as well as increasing household income foreign aid has been a catalyst in improving gender equality but it has not done so alone women themselves have actively organized to ensure the rights are respected their voices are heard in decision making bodies their bargaining power both at home and in local communities is boosted and their participation in economic life is amplified some partner countries have passed legislation to help remove constraints to women's participation in labour and credit markets and to make divorce and inheritance laws far more gender equitable still more needs to be done to end violence against women and girls and to improve women's asset ownership and access to credit together with their participation in paid employment and politics and importantly to improve men's contribution to childcare and domestic work UNU wider researchers from all over the world have come together to find out what works what could work what is scalable and what is transferable in foreign aid to learn more come visit our website at weconf.wider.unu.edu