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The momentum for addressing women’s economic empow-
erment is high. In 2016, the Secretary-General of the United
Nations launched the High Level Panel (HLP) on Women’s
Economic Empowerment, which gathers together various
high-level stakeholders from the United Nations, develop-
ment banks, member states, the private sector, academics and
civil society. The panel will make recommendations on six
areas, namely eliminating legal barriers to women’s economic
empowerment, addressing the care economy, reducing gender
pay gaps, expanding opportunities for women in informal
work, financial and digital inclusion, and fostering women’s
entrepreneurship and enhancing the productivity of women-
owned enterprises. The HLP report will provide useful best
practice guidance for the implementation of SDG 5.
The Finnish Government launched its new develop-
ment policy early in 2016, putting increased emphasis
on strengthening the rights of women and girls, including
their participation in the economy. Gender mainstreaming
has traditionally been our stronghold, advancing the rights
of women and girls in various sectors and at all levels. Our
objectives for gender equality are to ensure education and
skills development, participation in politics and the economy,
access to services, self-autonomy and living free of violence.
We advance them through specific programming and as a
cross-cutting objective in all development policy.
We channel core financing to our strategic partners UN
Women, the United Nations Population Fund and Unicef,
and implement programmes at the country level in partner-
ship with them. For example, our support for the women’s
economic empowerment programme through UN Women in
Nepal focuses on providing vocational training and skills devel-
opment to the most vulnerable groups such as women living
with HIV, returnee women migrant workers and home-based
workers. Some of the women live in areas that were also affected
by the 2015 earthquake and several of themwere conflict survi-
vors or ex-soldiers. The vocational training empowers women
to be active participants in the peacebuilding efforts and links
their livelihoods to the national efforts on women, peace and
security.
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The programme also builds local capacities to do
gender-responsive budgeting and develop a favourable policy
environment for women’s economic empowerment.
Finland’s Aid for Trade (AFT) programme is an umbrella
that harnesses various interventions on private sector devel-
opment and engagement. AFT offers possibilities to promote
trade and economic development in developing countries, and
for ordinary people to benefit from it.
One crucial aspect of this programme from a gender
perspective has been sex-disaggregated results monitoring and
reporting. This has enabled the monitoring of outcomes such
as supported jobs and companies by gender. For example,
the recent results monitoring showed that 44 per cent of
supported jobs were for women in Finland’s AFT programme.
Availability of sex-disaggregated data is particularly impor-
tant when the main approach is gender mainstreaming. It is a
useful way to address discriminatory structures and practices
across sectors and gradually make them more inclusive. It can
be a comprehensive approach to women’s empowerment and
provides a broader financial base for gender interventions. But
it also poses challenges in tracking expenditure and results.
Strengthening reporting systems to disaggregate outcomes by
gender is crucial in order to understand the impact of our inter-
ventions and feedback to policymaking and programme design.
AFT contributes to decent employment and, in the long
run, to improved domestic resource mobilization in devel-
oping countries. The final beneficiaries of AFT – the poor
people in developing countries – need public services, a clean
environment, nutrition and many other things in order to be
productive, innovative and entrepreneurial.
Gender equality and women’s economic opportunities and
entrepreneurship are key goals of Finland’s AFT Action Plan.
Macroeconomic policies profoundly impact the status and
position of women and men in society, and gender equal-
Image: Indra Gurung
The women’s economic empowerment programme in Nepal focuses on providing vocational training and skills development
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