UAE Gender Balance Council, OECD identify best practices for gender mainstreaming in government

The UAE Gender Balance Council, in collaboration with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), held two sessions to identify best practices for gender mainstreaming in government, and strengthening access to justice for women and girls.

Experts from government and international organisations discussed policy and legislative examples of how to ensure government employees around the world can embed a gender lens in their work, and to identify the specific and unique legal needs of women and girls required to integrate a gender lens into service delivery within justice systems. The results of these meetings will inform the ‘Global Best Practices for Gender Balance Toolkit’, a global, open-access resource being developed by the UAE Gender Balance Council and the OECD as a project of the Global Council on Sustainable Goal 5 (Gender Equality).

The Toolkit will support decision makers in designing gender responsive policies, programmes, and frameworks with the intention of advancing meaningful gender equality around the world. Considering the unprecedented impacts of Covid-19, the Toolkit will also include lessons learnt from previous economic and health crises to inform gender-sensitive preparedness and management of future economic, social, and public health crises.

Pursuing a women’s empowerment agenda

The first consultation addressed Section 5 of the Toolkit – ‘Equipping Policy Makers to Pursue a Women’s Empowerment Agenda’, while the second addressed Section 4 - ‘Strengthening access to justice for women and girls’.

The consultations included more than 35 technical gender experts from around the world, including Shamsa Saleh, Secretary-General of the UAE Gender Balance Council; Tatyana Teplova, Senior Counsellor on Gender Equality and Justice, and Head of Division, at the OECD; Marcy Grossman, Ambassador of Canada to the UAE; Yusuke Sato, Director of the Cabinet Office in the Government of Japan; Rania Al Jarf, Director of the Gender Balance Centre at the Supreme Council for Women in Bahrain; Isabel Santagostino, Private Sector Development Specialist at the World Bank; and Dilanthi Amaratunga, Professor of Disaster Risk Reduction and Management at the University of Huddersfield in the UK; as well as additional gender experts from the UAE, the US, France, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Norway, Egypt, Tunisia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Romania, and Malaysia.

— business@khaleejtimes.com