About ADB

Improving the Status of Women

ADB's new goal of poverty reduction has focused attention on improving the status of women. Most of the poor in the region are women. In many societies, women are disproportionately burdened by poverty and systematically excluded from access to resources, essential services, and decision making. Yet they contribute to the economy and to the fight against poverty through their remunerative work as well as their unpaid work at home and in the community.

Providing economic opportunities for poor women to improve their incomes is therefore a critical strategy for poverty reduction. Policy changes must be made and investments in women across all sectors must increase to provide women with greater access to education, primary health services, and income and employment opportunities.

In 1999, ADB's activities focused on implementing the revised Policy on Gender and Development (GAD). ADB

• drafted a GAD Action Plan,

• recruited more gender specialists at headquarters,

• fielded local gender specialists in six resident missions,

• prepared sectoral gender checklists,

• drafted a manual on best practices, and

• laid the groundwork for the establishment of an external forum on gender.

The GAD policy promotes gender equity through gender mainstreaming. Examples of gender mainstreaming can be found in all aspects of ADB operations: infrastructure, resettlement, agriculture, forestry and natural resource management, microfinance, and the social sectors (education, health, and water supply and sanitation).

Several loan and technical assistance projects carried out or approved in 1999 address gender issues.

• ADB's study of rural Asia emphasizes the need to treat gender as a cross-cutting issue and to support activities that improve women's access to social infrastructure, services, employment and income-earning opportunities, decision making, and community-based organizations.

• The technical assistance to the Greater Mekong Subregion addresses gender issues related to the vulnerability of women to HIV/AIDS and the specific problems faced by ethnic minority women in accessing educational opportunities and health services.

• The technical assistance to Sri Lanka for Protected Area Management and Wildlife Conservation analyzes and seeks to resolve the gender-based constraints on women in forest management and food production.

• India's Karnataka Urban Development and Coastal Environmental Management Project will deal with the complex issues of gender and poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and women's lack of organization and lack of access to decision making.

• The Madhya Pradesh Public Resource Management Program in India will mainstream gender concerns in public enterprise reform programs by providing for equal benefits and equal access to training and retraining opportunities for women employees, and targeted assistance for poor communities to improve access to health and education.

• The Kyrgyz Republic Agriculture Area Development Project will address gender issues related to land ownership and access by women, their participation in new producer organizations, and their access to training, credit, and markets.

• Pakistan's Punjab Farmer-Managed Irrigation Project attempts to provide culturally appropriate tools to deal with gender inequality in irrigation management decision making.

• The Sri Lanka Skills Development Project addresses the problem of gender tracking in technical and vocational education, which leads to high rates of unemployment and low incomes among women. The project provides for labor market information for potential trainees, new skills development for women, skills identification and certification by the private sector, and finance for women trainees wishing to start their own business.

Also in 1999, ADB placed locally recruited gender specialists in its resident missions in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Viet Nam. In this way, it intends to:

• build the GAD capacity of project executing agencies in developing member countries (DMCs);

• improve the quality of implementation of ADB-financed loans and technical asssistance addressing gender concerns; and

• expand the scope of ADB activities in the area of GAD at the country level.

The gender specialists help administer the GAD aspects of ADB-assisted loans and technical assistance. They assist ADB programming and project missions in integrating gender considerations, and provide gender capacity building and training to executing agencies and resident mission staff in the host country. They also facilitate communication on gender issues among ADB, DMC governments, external funding agencies, and nongovernment organizations.

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