Strengthening Gender Mainstreaming in Africa’s Peace Operations - The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD)
The changing nature of conflict has placed numerous demands on peace operations, giving more emphasis to multidimensionality and the need to increase women participation as well as mainstream gender issues in a mission environment. Women peacekeepers have proven that they can perform the same roles, to the same standards and under the same difficult conditions, as their male counterparts. It is also important to note that there has been an increased commitment by the African Union (AU) reflected through several AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) open sessions on women, peace and security and deployment of gender officers to its peace operation mission. The commitment by the UN Security Council is exemplified through the resolutions like 1325,1820, 1888, 1960, 1889, 2106, and 2122 which have supported gender mainstreaming in peacekeeping. Despite these gains, there are considerable challenges in mainstreaming gender considerations into UN and AU peace operations. Overall the UN system, the Security Council, the AU and all Member States must more consistently address women, peace and security issues across their work in order to meet their obligations.
Continuous, specialised and sustained training: The UN should consider the need for continuous training on issues of gender and women’s rights under international humanitarian law and international human rights law. This is vital for the implementation of international legal frameworks for strengthening gender perspectives in Africa's peace operations. Due to the complex nature of current peace operations, there is an increasing need for the military, police and civilian personnel to be equipped with practical skills and contextual knowledge to interact with local women and men in the environment they operate in. Training thus helps to explain the basic gender concepts and how attitudes and behavior towards gender may impact one’s own performance in support of the mission. Noting training as crucial step for properly targeted interventions, there is therefore a dire need to integrate practical training on women, peace and security issues, including the prevention of sexual and gender based violence, into police, civilian and military training, supplemented by mission-specific training for peacekeepers. They should explicitly incorporate information on the impact of armed conflict on women and girls, and on the roles and contributions of women and girls in conflict situations. These trainings should be sustainable and not just one - off events. They should therefore be incorporated as part of mission specific induction training and ongoing in-mission specialised training.
Strengthening monitoring and evaluation on implementation of 1325: The level of implementation of the national action plans (NAPs) for implementation of 1325 and its successes remain debatable. This is because the reviews and assessments done on 1325 have not been consistent. Every review has its own approach; the UN can therefore establish a standard mechanism for reviewing the work done on implementing 1325. The UN should establish strong, results-based monitoring and evaluation mechanisms that offer clear indicators and outline specific timeframes for all activities which are regularly reviewed. The NAPs developed by member states have some indicators to be used in the monitoring process, but they are mostly quite vague and generic. More frequent review of the progress, challenges and best practices on the implementation of 1325 should be undertaken. The reviews on women, peace and security should be done at shorter intervals by the UN, on a yearly basis to ensure the implementation of 1325 is on track. The member states measure their success differently using country specific indicators. However, this monitoring is inconsistent and adhoc, thus there is need for a more common approach to monitoring and evaluating the implementation of 1325 at the national and regional level. The UN can help in this regard by training member states on how to monitor and evaluate the progress of 1325. A process to include civil society and relevant actors in the design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation process is key. The UN should ensure that sex disaggregated data should reflect in the reporting and in the benchmarking of the global indicators on women, peace and security accompanied by an analysis of the data. The UN should consider putting in place an appropriate mechanism or procedure of the Security Council to systematically monitor commitments by parties in implementing 1325.
Increase coordination and reporting in continental and regional Mechanisms: There are numerous efforts and processes that support the implementation of 1325 in Africa and this should be coordinated to avoid duplication of efforts and maximise on the utilization of the resources to achieve greater impact. In order to ensure that gender considerations are meaningfully and effectively mainstreamed into peace operations, the UN should strengthen coordination efforts with the African Union Commission for reporting and information sharing on gender mainstreaming activities in peace operations. These reports should contain an analysis and barriers to implementation, not just general information and lists of activities. Reports should further include concrete recommendations on ways to improve implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda across the work of the missions. The UN should further support efforts by appropriate regional organisations to engage in dialogue with State and non-State parties to elicit commitments, including engagement, as appropriate, with the business community, diaspora, religious and traditional leaders or others who may exert influence on issues of women, peace and security.
Support community infrastructure for protection of women: In most conflict environment where local women protection activities exist, there are weak or no structure in place to facilitate the work that needs to be undertaken in protecting women. For example, there are hardly any structures available to deter or prevent violence against girls or women in the community. This negatively affects the protection of women and children in poor communities. The UN should emphasize its support to women in this regard. A key success inherent in peace and security issues is to utilize and engage community structures to support a particular goal. Most often, women at the grass root level do not have maximum benefit from the implementation of the peace and security agenda. In order to have impact on all women in a conflict society, increased local engagement should be emphasized in a peace operations environment. The UN should therefore support processes and coordination systems that ensure the inclusion of local authorities including indigenous and traditional women leaders in development, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of strategies to guarantee ownership and inclusive participation.
Establish formal funding mechanism to support implementation of resolutions on women, peace and security: Crucially, the UN working with other actors like the AU should establish a formal funding mechanism to support implementation of resolution 1325 and the six subsequent Security Council Resolutions including 1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106 and 2122 in Africa. This mechanism should fall within the budgets of peacekeeping missions of the UN and regional organizations. More often the funding for the implementation of these resolutions are limited and adhoc.
Increase funding to the local actors implementing 1325: Inadequate funding and staffing for gender remains to be a problem in the planning and implementation of peace operation. To facilitate the effective integration of a gender strategy within peace operations there needs to be a genuine commitment to provide sufficient amount of funding to ensure meaningful implementation, monitoring and evaluation- with specific gender sensitive indicators- of efforts by all actors. In order to strengthen gender in African peace operations, funding support for regional women’s organisations and for non-governmental organisations working to achieve gender equality is an important element that peace operations can explore for supporting women’s empowerment and participation in protection strategies. These organisations often have detailed knowledge, rooted in local realities, of the social and cultural barriers to gender equality and promotion and protection of women’s rights and can recognise and address the impact of gender inequalities at local, national and international levels .
Gender-sensitivity training resources: The UN should encourage and support the availability of gender specific training resources to all personnel from contributing countries for the purposes of national pre-deployment preparation. It should also ensure that there is dedicated gender training expertise in the UN training departments for strengthened capacity at the strategic level and in the field mission training cells. Further, the UN should ensure that mission force commanders commit to training their troops using country-specific training modules, which emphasizes on the gender issues specific to the mission. This can be done by ensuring that the training resources include ‘’Contextualised Mission Gender Packs’’ that could be made available to all troops in the entire deployment zone, specifically to strengthen the fight against sexual and gender based violence (SGBV) and provide key practical recommendations for peacekeepers.
Constructive partnership with other actors on generating and developing capacities: It is important to leverage the capacity of institutions outside of the UN system in order to take advantage of specialised skills that could not be readily available in a mission environment. These niche skills can be found in member states — in government, in civil society and in the private sector. It is therefore expedient that UN strengthen its external partnership with think tanks and social movements through to address gender issues in peace operations. UN peace operations also should improve opportunities for collaboration with women’s groups at the local and regional levels to encourage and promote women participation in peace processes and state building. Political processes supported by UN peace operations should prioritise the development of dedicated dialogue platforms for the inclusion of women issues into peace processes as well as state building approaches. Specific attention should include identifying, supporting, and training women leaders in mission environments to boost their engagement in mediation at all levels.
