suggestions on how donors can contribute to the PRSP’s

Donors can play a major role in providing support for members of civil society, NGOs and governments in engendering the PRSPs:

Poverty assessments

• The collection and analysis of sex-disaggregated data is a priority in order to enhance the development of gender-sensitive poverty reduction strategies. This should include strengthening the link between gender research and policy interventions.
• Support PPAs not only in collating sex-disaggregated, qualitative data, but also in feeding it into policy-making, implementation and monitoring. The PPAs recently initiated in Tanzania are doing groundbreaking work on bridging the gap between research and policy and ensuring that they are gender-sensitive.
• Use poverty assessments to measure the impact of the PRSPs and feed into updates.

Consultation and communication

• Communicate information about the PRSP consultation process and content in local languages, using media forms that are appropriate to each community, such as short leaflets, dramas, video or radio soap operas and at times appropriate to all.
• Build the capacity of a diverse range of women and organisations supporting women’s rights to participate in the process.
• Support economic literacy which is needed for a better understanding of economic and debt relief issues. Ideally this will help excluded groups such as indigenous people and women’s collectives to participate in decision-making on policies orientated to poverty reduction.

Gender advocates

§ 'Institutionalise' the issues amongst decision-makers. Currently social equity for the economists is to do with social stratification and rarely gender and diversity.

§ Build the gender analysis skills of stakeholders involved in ensuring that information from poverty assessments and consultations is fed into policy and monitoring strategies.

Content

• Employ and support gender specialists to help mainstream gender into the PRSP process, as long as other actors are aware that gender awareness is everybody’s responsibility. For example, ensure that there is a social development advisor with a speciality in gender on the PRSP technical team.

Co-ordination and cross-learning

• Support cross-learning experiences, for example, both within and between countries. However, it is important to note that country-specific contexts and their starting points from which they develop a PRSP are important for determining outcomes.
• Ensure greater co-ordination of efforts and sharing of lessons learnt between donors, governments and NGOs.

Implementation, follow-up and monitoring

• Simplify the conceptual debate on gender and diversity and make it relevant to a practical level.
• Strengthen performance management on gender mainstreaming; action needs to be taken if staff do not comply.
• Check budget allocations and actual expenditure for gender (and other cross-cutting issues). Gender budget initiatives should be encouraged.

Source: Bell.