The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) is one of five United Nations regional commissions. ESCWA serves as an inter-governmental platform for advancing regional integration, developing regional norms and standards, exchanging experience, and fostering cooperation. It plays a critical role in promoting a comprehensive approach to development in the region, by balancing the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development in member States.

ESCWA’s Programme, which consists of six sub-programmes, integrates gender equality and the empowerment of women throughout its results and deliverables. Sub-programme 2 is dedicated to gender justice, population and inclusive development, and encompasses gender equality.   ESCWA’s Cluster 2, the organizational unit primarily responsible for/aligned with sub-programme 2, also houses the ESCWA Centre for Women. The Centre implements projects specifically dedicated to improving the status and rights of women by aiding member States to mainstream gender perspectives in national strategies, policies, legislation and programmes.  ESCWA also has a second-generation Policy on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (2019 – 2023) in place, which, among other policy goals, commits to addressing gender equality through its substantive and operational divisions, in the research it produces and publishes and within the projects it designs and implements.

ESCWA is one of the early adopters of a mandatory gender equality marker (GEM). ESCWA’s gender equality marker is based on the UNDG standard of a four-point scale – 0, 1, 2a, and 2b -and is used to assess the extent to which gender equality is addressed in core areas of ESCWA’s work: knowledge production (research and analysis); capacity building and technical cooperation and fostering regional and sub-regional consensus. (See Table 1)  

Table 1: Gender Equality Marker Scale

The gender equality marker is applied at the “deliverable” level. Deliverables include high-level, inter-governmental conferences, expert group meetings and seminars, capacity-building workshops and publications.  Applying the gender equality marker at this level enables ESCWA to ensure that deliverables are designed and implemented in a gender-sensitive manner as well as to track annual financial allocations and expenditures on gender equality and the empowerment of women at a more granular level.  A proposal to enhance the use of the gender equality marker by also applying it at the project level is under consideration at ESCWA.  This would ensure that projects adequately integrate gender equality throughout the project framework. 

ESCWA applies the gender equality marker at the planning stage. Project managers are responsible for ensuring that gender equality is adequately integrated into all activities. Coding, which is based on project-based workplans, takes place in the ESCWA portal. 

Well before the introduction and roll out of the Integrated Planning, Monitoring and Reporting (IPMR), ESCWA was the first among regional economic commissions and UN Secretariat entities to link the gender equality marker to the UMOJA enterprise resource planning system. By “projectizing” all of its substantive work, ESCWA was able to apply the gender equality marker across all its revenue sources (i.e., regular budget, development account) of the programmatic budget. This includes the ability to estimate the amount of human resources (staff and consultants) that have been committed to producing tagged deliverables by tracking their time.  For the part of the budget that has not been projectized, such as the administrative and operations support budget, resources allocated to gender equality and the empowerment of women cannot be tracked. To calculate gender equality-related financial allocations and expenditures, ESCWA retrieves and rolls up the financial data across its portfolio of projects from the ESCWA Portal in the aggregate as well as by gender equality marker score.  

Financial target: Even though ESCWA has not set a financial target for gender equality-specific spending, annual expenditures across all gender equality marker values tend to average about 15% of the programmatic budget (excluding staff costs).  What ESCWA has established is an annual ratio for different ratings of the gender marker for its publications to minimize the proportion of publications that are “gender-blind” (gender equality marker score of 0), and to facilitate an increase in the number of publications that mainstream gender (gender equality marker score of 2A or “significant”).  

In 2019, ESCWA produced internal guidance to support greater accuracy and consistency in coding. The guidance includes specific criteria, as well as examples, on each gender equality marker value for the different categories of deliverables that ESCWA produces. It has been incorporated into the project template. Similarly, any planned publication is assessed at the concept note stage, with respect to its gendered contribution by the ESCWA Publications Committee (See Box 1). 

Project coordinators and project teams are responsible for mainstreaming gender equality into activities and projects and for assigning an accurate gender marker code to their deliverables. They are supported in this role by (i) the ESCWA Gender Focal Point Network (GFPN), which includes dedicated gender focal points in substantive units (or Clusters) that provide capacity building and substantive guidance  and (ii) the SPARK team, which ensures that gender equality considerations are addressed at the planning stage and that deliverables are coded in the Portal.  In addition, the ESCWA SWAP coordinator / ESCWA Centre for Women run information sessions as part of the on-boarding process for all new ESCWA personnel and offer periodic training courses to build deeper understanding and stronger institutional capacity on gender mainstreaming. Gender mainstreaming is also reflected in the new internal training on Results-based Management.

While a strong quality assurance process is in place for ESCWA publications (see Box 1 below), a key UN-SWAP recommendation suggests a need to further bolster the quality assurance process around other deliverables. The GFPN and the SPARK team have developed a proposal for improving the accuracy and consistency of applying the gender equality marker throughout the project cycle, with a particular focus on the implementation and monitoring phases. Specifically, by acknowledging the dynamic nature of projects and principles of adaptive management, the proposal entails an iterative engagement with “owners” on a sample of deliverables during implementation. The enhanced approach would allow ESCWA to tackle the issue of over-coding or under-coding at the planning stage, while promoting ongoing reflection and efforts to mainstream gender equality throughout projects. At the same time, ESCWA would be able to track more explicitly gender equality expenditures against allocations. A comparison of budget allocations and financial expenditures at the end of the project would provide a more accurate measure of actual funds spent on gender equality and an opportunity to assess the gender equality results achieved by the deliverable. Such a process would therefore link intentions with results.

Together the ESCWA Portal and UMOJA/IPMR enable ESCWA to track and retrieve programmatic and financial information on gender equality and the empowerment of women. The Portal can aggregate and disaggregate gender equality marker data by cluster, project, deliverable or code. The availability of and accessibility to such data promotes internal discussion on the opportunities to enhance the gender dimension in various outputs.

The SPARK Unit analyzes the data (on demand) and presents its analysis to the Centre of Women. This data is reported internally and externally, as relevant, and appears in the annual reports of the UN-SWAP or in the bi-annual reports of the ESCWA Committee on Women to governing bodies.  

In 2021, approximately 85 per cent of deliverables across the six sub-programmes (or clusters) integrated gender equality dimensions. Forty per cent of those deliverables were rated as having gender equality as a significant and principal objective; with 44.2% making a limited contribution and the remaining 15.75% making no contribution.  See Figure 1.

Figure 1 Gender Marker Code Breakdown

Approximately 52% of ESCWA’s expenditures, excluding staff costs, were spent on deliverables with a gender marking of “principal” (16.75%) (2B) and “significant” (35.42%) (2A); 33.77% and 14.24% of expenditures respectively were spent on deliverables tagged as “limited” (1) and gender “blind” (0) contributions to gender equality and the empowerment of women.  

Tracking financial allocations and expenditures to gender equality, while a good metric to have, are not, on their own an accurate or holistic measure of an entity’s institutional commitment to gender equality and the empowerment of women. Of greater importance are measures taken to ensure that gender equality is mainstreamed in programme(s) and across the entire project cycle.
 
The gender equality marker has helped to ensure that gender equality is considered throughout the project life cycle. Although it is not part ESCWA’s formal control mechanisms, the gender equality marker has found a much more meaningful application as an awareness raising and capacity building tool that has fostered changes in attitudes, behaviours and organizational culture. As a result, this has contributed to improved programme and project design.  

Gender mainstreaming is an iterative process as it relies on building capacities incrementally and over time. Additional investments in training and coaching project managers and staff will lead to a more accurate and consistent application of the gender equality marker but, most importantly, to a greater consideration of entry points for mainstreaming gender in ESCWA’s projects and deliverables. 

There is still significant room to invest in quality assurance processes and to expand on the institutional gains made to date with respect to the use of the gender equality marker at the planning stage and for the purposes of financial reporting. ESCWA also has the opportunity to deploy the gender equality marker as part of its adaptive management toolkit, allowing for iterative gendered considerations of deliverables and projects throughout implementation and the entire project cycle.