Dear organizers,
thanks for this excellent discussion and in-depth inputs on this topic. I would like to share some insights from the work of the four UN agencies, UN Women, FAO, IFAD and WFP on the Rural Women Economic Empowerment in Kyrgyzstan. It is a unique joint programme of the four agencies, which aims to address the multiple challenges faced by rural women in an integrated manner. The programme brings together expertise of the four UN agencies, and has proven to be effective in providing an integrated response to the various aspects of rural women's empowerment. Specifically, an external evaluation has found the programme to be a flagship joint programme due to a single entry point, through which the UN agencies have provided a single integrated development assistance to the same group of beneficiaries. This has accelerated internal empowerment process, allowed the rural women to build on the increased economic agency to internalize leadership skills, practice them at the level of their households and communities. Evaluation has also confirmed transformative changes taking place in rural women's lives due to the multidimensional approach taken in the joint programme, which included access to productive assets, business skills, access to revolving funds, institutionalization of women's groups through establishment of women's cooperatives, access to processing technologies for moving women's groups up along the value chains for increased value added and higher negotiation powers, capacity building for women's better leadership, participation and influence on local gender-responsive development planning, service provision and decision-making processes. Finally,the programme has allowed to bring the voice of rural women to the national level policy debates, policy formulation and legislative processes.
The evaluation also called for continued collaboration focusing on the rural women in the country. The programme in Kyrgyzstan has established effective coordination mechanism, whereby it not only benefitted rural women but also allowed cross fertilization of approaches used by UN agencies, shared knowledge production in the interventions with the highest transformative effect on the rural women. While the focus so far has been on mobilizing the most vulnerable groups of rural women, there is a need to continue institutional support to women entrepreneurs supported through the programme, and women's cooperatives. Short term and funding challenges of the programme created challenges for upscaling of these approaches on a wider scope and to engage in longer-term policy discussions. It is great to see that many inputs recognize the importance of addressing sexual and reproductive rights of rural women. Unfortunately, due to funding limitations, these issues have not been a priority for the joint programme, and have only be partly covered through partnership with other UN agencies. However, upon reflection we see that empowering rural women to exercise reproductive rights is important for transformation of their lives. In addition there is a need to engage in policy discussions at both local and national levels to recognize, redistribute and reduce the care burden on young rural women. There is an urgent need to engage in macroeconomic policy discussions, which go beyond mere support to women's enterpreneurship, but integrate and focus macroeconomic policies on creating environment for the empowerment of rural women. Rural women tend to concentrate in informal employment sector without social security and pension support. Fiscal, monetary and trade policies should be formulated with a focus on creating better opportunities for rural women. Discussions around government spending should be informed by the exsiting research on the huge potential of investing in the care economy and early childhood development. This is unfortunately not possible within a short timeframe and limited funding of the joint programme. It also requires building of local research and expertise in policy formulation from gender perspective.
Finally, in line with the 'leaving noone behind' principle it is important to understand that rural women are not a homogenous group, and contains groups with multiple forms of discrimination, including single mothers, female-headed households, women with disabilities, women with children with disabilities, women from ethnic and religious minority groups, young women, women of non-traditional sexual orientation, etc. It is important to ensure that these groups have equal opportunity to benefit from the government policies and development assistance.
Mme Jipara Turmamatova