Aid for Trade in Asia and the Pacific by Asian Development Bank;

Author:Asian Development Bank;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Asian Development Bank Institute
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The same level of exploration is needed in trade agreements and reforms, and includes

• incorporating gender issues in the main body of trade agreements, advocating for the inclusion of gender-related provisions;

• ensuring that liberalization commitments effectively and adequately reflect the interests and concerns of women;

• developing monitoring, evaluation, and accountability mechanisms to ascertain the impacts of trade reforms on gender equality over time and ensure that implementation strategies;

• addressing gender structural inequalities as well as of budgetary allocations to effectively carry out these implementation strategies; and

• ensuring policy coherence between trade and other policies, such as labor market policies.35

Two other essential elements for achieving gender mainstreaming in trade policy making are

• widening consultative processes to include women’s perspectives in determining national priorities and formulating advocacy positions (voice and agency); and

• intensifying efforts to increase the number of senior women around the negotiating table, in which capacity needs to be built within nations and regionally (UNCTAD 2016).

Ultimately, a critical mass of female trade negotiators who can enhance women’s agency and voice is more likely to bring positions about gender-equitable outcomes of trade agreements to the negotiating table.

Aid for Trade can play a very important role in supporting all measures discussed here and should help to inform program design and implementation in support of gender equality though trade. The next Chapter gives particular attention to the empowerment of women through strategic support from AfT interventions in MSMEs across the region.

Lastly, besides AfT, integrating and scaling up the gender equality focus of official development assistance (ODA) in other priority areas is essential. Development budgets for gender equality represent a small fraction of overall ODA, despite political commitments. Between 2009 and 2017, around 30% of total aid disbursements in developing Asia was targeted at gender equality.36

How to ensure trade liberalization is inclusive, including by creating equal opportunities for women and men is part of the debate about trade and sustainable development. While World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements do not include specific provisions referring explicitly to gender, different trade-related gender issues have recently been discussed. As of June 2019, 123 WTO members and observer countries, many from Asia and the Pacific, have endorsed the Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s economic empowerment, which calls for more gender-responsive trade and development policies (Box 3.3).

Ultimately, because gender equality cuts across all areas of sustainable development and is not limited to trade-related activities, strategically mainstreaming gender in development interventions that attract higher financing can significantly boost volumes of gender-targeted aid.

Box 3.3: Gender-related Provisions in Preferential Trade Agreements

In parallel to multilateral discussions, a limited but increasing number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), currently 78, include provisions mentioning women and gender (box figure 1). The inclusion of such provisions is, however, not a recent phenomenon. The very first gender-related article was found in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community (EEC). This article required application of the principle of equal pay for women and men.

1: Evolution of the number of PTAs with gender-related provisions

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