Gender and Development

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Indonesia

Gender Equity in Policy and Program Planning

2002

Regional Autonomy brought about by the decentralization process requires existing gender mainstreaming strategies be adapted into the evolving institutions under the regional autonomy structure. District governments need to strengthen their capacity to mainstream gender in their policies and programs. To date, resources have been allocated mainly to capacity building of the State Ministry of Women's Empowerment (SMWE) and line ministries at the national level. There is need to redirect resources to support activities to integrate gender equity concerns in district policies, strategies and programs and to conduct a review of the district PROPEDAS (Regional Development Plans).

The first part of the project will assist SMWE to conduct workshops at the provincial level to identify approaches to gender sensitive policy and program planning and implementation and how to strengthen existing procedures. The workshops will provide critical inputs to a gender mainstreaming strategy and implementation action plan that will also be a critical part of regional and national development plans.

The second part will strengthen district government's capacity to develop gender sensitive policies and programs (PROPEDAS) and systematically mainstream gender in policy and program planning and implementation. Active cooperation and participation of NGOs and civil society will be encouraged in pilot projects in four districts. These pilot projects aim to adopt new modalities for implementing projects involving local governments and NGOs. Aside from ensuring a gender balance in the local civil service, emphasis will be given on training needs of women.

The third part of the TA will be a documentation of lessons learned from the pilot projects that will be presented in a workshop. They will also be inputs for the national gender policy and will likewise contribute to future gender mainstreaming program and projects initiated by multilateral and bilateral funding agencies.

Implementation Progress, May 2003

As part of the implementation of the technical assistance "Project Gender Equity in Policy and Program Planning" in Indonesia, two workshops on "Gender Equity and Regional Autonomy" were held in Lampung and Central Java in August 2002. The workshops identified strategies to facilitate implementation of gender concerns in the Regional Policy and Program Development and in the annual Regional Development Plan.

Four pilot projects have been identified in the four districts, North Lampung, Central Lampung, Wonosobo and Sragen. The fish cultivation project in North Lampung will develop an unutilized water resource to increase opportunities for improvement in nutrition and for generating an income for women and men. Project implementation will be based on gender responsive participatory processes to ensure women's participation in decision-making. In Central Lampung the pilot project will prepare a gender profile book for development planning. The pilot project will establish mechanisms to collect sex-disaggregated data from community up to district planning level and establish a coordination mechanism between Women's Empowerment sub-division, the Bureau of Statistics and Bappeda in sex-disaggregated data collection and gender responsive planning.

In Wonosobo and Sragen, the pilot projects will build the capacity of selected communities to facilitate gender responsive bottom-up planning and provide skills training to increase women's participation in economic activities. The pilot projects will increase gender awareness at the district level by developing a mechanism to facilitate participatory gender responsive bottom-up planning at district level and identify gender responsive programs to be financed by local government.

As part of capacity building of local government in mainstreaming gender concerns in policy and programs, a training needs assessment was conducted in the four project areas to identify gaps between the current knowledge and skills of selected district sector divisions and the requirements needed to mainstream gender in policy and program planning.

The Project has already had significant impact in the four districts. In Sragen, the head of the district parliament pledged that gender responsive programs would receive priority approval from the district parliament. In Wonosobo, the district parliament has suggested that a pilot project similar to that of the Project be proposed for funding entirely through the district budget when that budget is revised mid year. In Wonosobo, the district government has allocated funds from the district budget to support project activities, which cannot be funded by the Project. This includes the production of the gender mainstreaming guidelines as a booklet for monitoring, coordination and consultation activities by the district with assistance of the Ministry of Women's Empowerment and the Bureau of Women's Empowerment at province level. Additional resources have been allocated to gender activities, for example, in Central Lampung the staff working within Women's Empowerment sub-division has increased from 2 to 6 staff.

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