Norway places high priority on the issues of women’s rights and gender equality. It endeavours both to improve the inclusion as well as the implementation of women’s rights and gender equality in all its development cooperation activities. It is in view this fact that the government of Norway developed a new “Action Plan for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality in Development Cooperation (2007-2009)”. The Action Plan is a strategy of twin track gender mainstreaming and instructs all Embassies to increase efforts to ensure the mainstreaming of gender, environment and climate change and measures to combat corruption in all development cooperation.
It was in connection to this that the Embassy forwarded a request to Norad to conduct “Gender Washing” of its Natural Resources Management portfolio. The “Gender Washing “ exercise was conducted from 12- 16 January 2009 with the objectives of conducting a “gender washing” of development cooperation in the NRM portfolio and identifying ways and means of addressing and integrating women’s and gender concerns into development cooperation within present framework and budgets, and for possible future phases of the various programs and projects.
The “Gender Washing” exercise indicated that the Embassy should continue to raise gender issues in dialogues with partners so as to minimize the “implementation gap” on gender issues. Gender competence should also be be included in all reviews and evaluations and te Embassy should systematically include gender equality in preparatory analysis and stipulate a gender component to programs proposed by implementing partners. According to the results of the “Gender Washing” exercise, many of the Embassy’s partners have gender advisers and gender policies, but often these lack the competence (and commitment) to implement the policy. It is, therefore, recommended that the Embassy, together with partners, devises ways and means of strengthening the capacity of partners. The “Gender Washing” exercise also recommended that partners establish a baseline, and set targets and indicators for their work. In so doing, they would make it possible to monitor and evaluate performance, improve/change women’s situations, and so forth. It is also the responsibility of the highest level of management at the Embassy to ensure that gender issues are present on the agenda at all Annual Meetings and in dialogues with GoE, the “Gender Washing” exercise revealed.