Expanding on its gender successes of previous years, UN-REDD assisted 14 countries1 in breaking down gender barriers and inequalities, and integrating gender equality and women’s empowerment activities into nationally-led REDD+ action. In many cases, this work involved moving from policy to practice, producing positive and tangible outcomes and impacts at the national and subnational levels.
To help illustrate the breadth of these results, a number of country-specific examples are given below.
In Myanmar, acting on the 2018 findings of the gender and REDD+ analysis, concrete actions were taken to strengthen the gender-responsiveness of the country’s engagement processes, whereby women’s participation in consultations on the national REDD+ strategy increased from 21 per cent in 2017 to 42 per cent in 2019. Addressing findings from its 2018 gender analysis on REDD+ policies, actions and measures, Bangladesh engaged a gender expert in regional consultations on policies and measures in order to ensure the incorporation of a gender approach.
At the national level, a gender approach was integrated into the Honduran draft national REDD+ strategy, including in its main objective statement, and support is currently being provided to integrate a gender perspective into the policies and organizational management of the Honduran Bank for Production and Housing (BANHPROVI). In addition, a draft technical guide was developed to integrate gender considerations into the implementation of the Argentinian national action plan on forests and climate change, as well as to inform its REDD+ SIS.
Efforts to foster REDD+ action at the subnational level in Peru resulted in the equitable and meaningful engagement of women and representation of their interests in community-based forest management technical committees.
In Mexico, a flyer on “Gender equality: Tools for the implementation of REDD+” was published as part of a series of tools to support the application of REDD+ safeguards at the State-level. In 2019, through its efforts in promoting women’s equitable involvement in capacity-building efforts, workshops, events and training, the Programme also successfully registered an increase in women’s participation in every region. Thus, based on data from 25 workshops, women represented 47.5 per cent of participants in Africa (a 7.5 per cent increase from 2018), 36.5 per cent in Asia and the Pacific (a 3.8 per cent increase from 2018) and 51 per cent in Latin America (a 4.7 per cent increase from 2018).
Many partner countries are successfully promoting women’s more equitable involvement in capacity-building efforts, workshops, events and trainings. In 2018, based on data from 60 UN-REDD organized/supported capacity and policydialogue workshops held worldwide, women represented on average 38 per cent of participants. In fact, some key UN-REDD supported events in Mongolia, Honduras and Mexico (with its national finance workshop) achieved a participation rate of over 45 per cent women.
At the global level, UNREDD participated in a panel discussion on the traditional knowledge of indigenous women during the International Indigenous Women’s Forum’s Global Leadership School in New York.
Furthermore, in its efforts to support its partner countries to meaningfully integrate a gender perspective into their policy and institutional commitments for REDD+, UN-REDD drafted a simple and concise “Checklist for gender-responsive workshops” (available in English, French and Spanish). An information brief detailing the scale, criteria and application of the UN-REDD gender marker rating system was also developed. In addition, Spanish and French translations of the UN-REDD methodological brief on gender are also now available.