Beyond 2015 for Women, Peace and Security CARE International Position on the 15th Anniversary of UNSCR 1325 - CARE International
This paper outlines recommendations from CARE International and its local civil society partners towards the 15th anniversary review of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (SCR 1325) on Women, Peace and Security (WPS), and the Global Study informing the review. The following are three major opportunities in the current year to strengthen and accelerate progress in realizing women’s rights and gender equality through the framework and operations established by this landmark resolution.
First, to regain the transformative intent behind the Resolution, the international community needs to step up efforts at all levels to enable meaningful participation by women and girls from the grassroots in decision-making processes. Efforts to include women are too often ad-hoc and tokenistic; the voices of women worst affected by conflict should be heard.
Second, we believe that progress on UNSCR 1325’s “relief and recovery” pillar has been inadequate, but that with the UN World Humanitarian Summit process underway, the time is ripe for efforts to reform the humanitarian system to better protect, assist and empower women and girls in emergencies.
Third, the new Sustainable Development Goals and the Women, Peace and Security agenda beyond 2015 need to be complementary and mutually reinforcing. There are documented good practices upon which to build, such as the use of Gender Markers in humanitarian response; participatory approaches to the National Action Plan on 1325 in Nepal; and the use of “Community Score Cards” to promote more effective service delivery and state-citizen relations in Rwanda. In the years following 2015, we need to take these experiences to scale.
1. Participation pillar: The Global Study on SCR 1325 and the 15th anniversary review should make recommendations, identify best practices and propose options for scale-up on:
- Strengthening “NAP localisation processes” to connect National Action Plans on 1325 to grassroots-level consultation on priorities and monitoring of progress. Donors, regional bodies and multilateral institutions should support conflict-affected states and civil society to implement participatory approaches to developing and monitoring policies, strategies and programmes on peace and security. Leading examples include embedding “localisation” strategies into technical assistance and funding to National Action Plans on SCR 1325, promoting gender-responsive budgeting and participatory monitoring in peace, security, governance and development strategies, and use of “social accountability tools”, such as “Community Score Cards”, to empower women to participate in defining priorities and monitoring and accountability efforts regarding service delivery and governance at the local level.
- Enhancing participation by grassroots women in UN Security Council (SC) decision-making on peace and security by: (a) establishing new annual Open Briefing Sessions on UNSCR 1325 participation efforts relating to countries on the Security Council agenda; (b) bringing grassroots women to New York to contribute to SC deliberations for each political or military mission mandate renewal and/or emergency SC meetings on country-specific mandates; (c) authorizing groups of SC experts to visit selected countries under SC mandate to assess progress on participation; and (d) establishing an Assistant Secretary General (ASG) or a D2 level senior official position at UN Women whose portfolio would prominently feature fast-tracking women’s participation in peacemaking and peacebuilding efforts.
2. Humanitarian relief and recovery pillar: The Global Study on SCR 1325 and the 15th anniversary review should assess both why progress has been slow on factoring gender into the humanitarian planning and response system, and outline strategic ways forward:
- Strengthen humanitarian leadership and coordination for gender equality, women’s empowerment and gender-based violence prevention and response efforts through enhanced and regularised cooperation and alignment of effort across the IASC Gender Reference Group, the GBV Area of Responsibility (AoR) and the global Call to Action on Violence Against Women and Girls in Emergencies.
- At the technical level, a joined-up approach to technical support for inter-agency strategy development, mainstreaming across clusters/sectors, programme design and capacity-building for both gender and GBV should become standardised, building on the Gender Stand-By Capacity Project (GENCAP) and the Regional Emergency Gender Based Violence Advisors (REGA) mechanisms.
- At the political level, UN Women should collaborate with the state chairing the Call to Action to convene annual reviews of donor and southern state engagement and progress on gender and GBV in emergencies commitments pegged to the GBV AoR annual retreat, the ECOSOC humanitarian segment and reviews of the post-Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction.
- Review progress and catalyse momentum behind a more comprehensive and aligned approach to Gender Markers by donors, UN agencies and NGOs to hold aid agencies accountable for addressing gender across the humanitarian programming cycle in line with the UN target to allocate 15 percent of funding in conflict contexts to gender-related efforts.
- Include results and recommendations of the Global Study to identify technical, funding and other gaps in the delivery of the Minimal Initial Service Package on Reproductive Health in Emergencies (MISP).
- Link post-2015 implementation of the UNSCR 1325 relief and recovery pillar, the post-Sendai global framework for disaster risk reduction and the World Humanitarian Summit outcomes, for example through promoting systematic engagement by local women’s groups in both global and country-level humanitarian policy and practice. National action plans on both resilience and women, peace and security provide important entry-points for this.
3. Link to post-2015 agenda: The post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should address longer-term structural and developmental barriers to peace, development and gender equality. This must include agreement on a stand-alone goal on gender equality with targets addressing gender-based violence, mainstreaming of gender across the wider SDGs and a clear framework to involve women in participatory monitoring and accountability at national and local levels.
Nepal National Action Plan on SCRs 1325 and 1820 – Case study of a participatory approach
With root causes including inequality, caste, ethnic and gender-based discrimination, the armed conflict in Nepal left more than 14,000 dead and around 200,000 displaced. The impact on women and girls was especially devastating, including sexual and gender based violence (SGBV). Poor, vulnerable, and socially excluded women were particularly affected. Around 30–40% of the Maoist combatants were estimated to be female, and women were also heavily involved in bringing about an end to the conflict. Yet Nepali women were absent from the formal peace negotiation table.
In 2011, following extensive advocacy by the Nepali women´s movement and UN, and under the leadership of Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction (MoPR), the Government of Nepal launched its National Action Plan (NAP) on UNSCRs 1325 and 1820. The process to develop the NAP was highly participatory from national to district level including participation by line ministries, civil society, women´s organizations and external development partners. Suggestions from women and girls directly affected by conflict were also taken on board. A key entry point for this effort was CARE and it’s partner organisations’ long-standing trust and good relationships with women and the wider community at the local level. Long-term support from CARE to women to form women’s solidarity groups and the facilitation of participatory approaches to identify their social, economic and other development needs provided a basis for consultations on the NAP.
The NAP follows the 4 pillars of the UN system-wide action plan: (1) Participation; (2) Protection and Prosecution; (3) Prevention and Promotion; (4) Relief and Recovery; plus Nepal added an extra pillar: (5) Resource Management, Monitoring and Evaluation. A civil society “1325 Action Group” was established to monitor implementation. In addition, the MoPR adopted a “NAP Localization Guideline” in 2013 with the goal of integrating NAP activities directly into the local planning processes. Programs along with budgets were granted to provide orientation to the “District Coordination Committees” (DCCs), as well as to the Local Peace Committees (LPCs), which are also supported by NGOs. With support from CARE International, Saathi, a national NGO, and the MoPR undertook the latest NAP Mid-Term Monitoring Report launched in October 2014.
That review points to important areas of progress, including increased awareness of how WPS should inform policy implementation, resource allocation, and capacity building of government and security officials. WPS is also seen as increasingly mainstreamed into wider development efforts, such as in the delivery of basic services. The report also documents how women have become more active as peace agents and human rights defenders, resolving conflicts at the family and community levels and assuming leadership roles that were previously considered culturally inappropriate. The need to address the specific “rehabilitation needs” of women is also increasingly recognized by Gender Focal Points in some local government offices.
However, challenges are also reported. There is a persistent lack of dedicated budget to address gender and WPS-related needs as well as weak coordination between responsible agencies. Accurate data regarding conflict-affected women and survivors of SGBV is often missing, which makes it harder to push for effective action by agencies, such as the Local Peace Committees. Finally, Nepali survivors of conflict-related violence, including gender-based violence, continue to face obstacles in seeking transitional justice and related compensation and reparations.
Challenges remain in terms of strengthening the day-to-day implementation of the localisation guidelines, which would require local planning and budgeting processes to be revised to ensure that the NAP activities are systematically incorporated.
CARE’s Experience of Implementing a “Gender Marker++” Across the Full Project Cycle in Syria and Mali
In 2014 CARE International began piloting an innovative Gender Marker within its humanitarian response in the Sahel and Syrian regional crises. The CARE Gender Marker goes beyond the equivalent IASC tool (currently limited to proposal stage) by also monitoring gender integration across design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The first six months of the pilot indicate that it is possible to implement a Gender Marker++ across all phases of project cycles. An initial evaluation indicates that doing so has brought gender into project decision-making in a more deliberate fashion and keeps it present in the minds of staff in CARE and our local civil society partners.
Key challenges arising thus far from the Gender Marker++ pilot relate to how to “grade” and do on-going assessments of how gender is incorporated. Current wider tools for assessing humanitarian response in terms of the kinds of qualitative and complex issues at stake for gender equality tend to happen only after a response is completed. It has proven less easy to assess the extent to which gender is integrated at the six-week, three-month and six-month stages. This year, CARE will pilot gender equality measures in the Jordan response in partnership with other agencies with a view to lessons learned informing a wider roll-out in other contexts in the coming period.
