EU 'half-hearted' in backing gender equality

The European Union's efforts to promote gender equality in poor countries have been dubbed "half-hearted" by the bloc's only directly elected institution. Around 17 billion euros (26 billion dollars) has been allocated to the EU's Development Cooperation Instrument (DCI) -- aid for Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and South Africa -- in the 2007-13 period. But though EU governments first declared in 1995 that advancement of women should be a core objective of the Union's development aid policy, gender issues are largely absent in the plans for spending the DCI's funds. A new European Parliament report bemoans how most of the DCI plans for helping individual countries contain no specific targets for improving the lot of women, or recommend supporting projects tailored to address the situation that poor women and girls find themselves in. The report assesses a strategy titled 'Gender Equality and Women Empowerment in Development Countries', that was proposed by the EU's executive, the European Commission, during 2007. While members of Parliament (MEPs) welcomed on Mar. 13 how the strategy suggests practical measures for addressing such issues as employment, education, health and violence against women, they argued that the paper is superficial in its treatment of fundamental questions. Felekans Uca, the German left-wing MEP who drafted the report, said that trade issues have not been properly addressed. Even though the strategy notes that trade liberalization can have "short-term negative consequences for vulnerable groups," it makes no reference to the free trade deals -- or Economic Partnership Agreements -- that the Commission is currently negotiating with African governments. Uca's report suggests that the use of trade to strengthen the position of women in poor countries warrants closer examination than it has been given by EU officials. In Africa, she noted, women comprise just over half the population, yet perform three-quarters of all farm work and produce over 60 percent of food. Yet below the Sahara, women earn just one-tenth of the income, and own just one percent of assets. Her report prompted a lively debate over references to the need for better family planning services in poor countries. Some center-right MEPs tried unsuccessfully to have calls for such improvements deleted. But Uca insisted that sexual and reproductive health is an issue of fundamental importance. In sub-Saharan Africa, she noted, women in the 15-24 age bracket are three times more likely to be infected with HIV than their male peers. And most of the 536,000 maternal deaths in the world -- nearly all of which occur in Asia and Africa -- could be "easily avoided" if there was global access to reproductive health services and obstetric care. "Every woman is entitled to decide in full freedom what happens to her life and body," she said. "As long as these rights are limited, other people will continue to decide on what happens to a woman's body. This is not something we can accept." Nirj Deva, a Sri Lanka-born MEP representing the British Conservative Party, urged that a "gender analysis" of abortions should be carried out. Deva argued that in Asia women frequently come under pressure to abort if they are carrying female fetuses. "Why do we not have the right to know how women are being aborted before they are born?" he asked. Yet his call failed to win support from a majority in the Parliament. Avril Doyle, an Irish MEP whose party Fine Gael is part of a political alliance with the Conservatives, suggested that Deva and a number of his colleagues had a hidden motive of trying to reduce the availability of family planning services. Doyle said she was "saddened" that every time reproductive health is addressed in the Parliament, "it descends into a very intolerant debate." Louis Michel, the European commissioner for development aid, said: "I completely agree with all those who think that reproductive health is important. Fundamentally, we have to create the conditions where people can make their own free choices." Still, he refuted accusations that aid plans drawn up by officials working for him overlook gender issues. The Commission, he said, has a policy of gender 'mainstreaming', under which a wide range of the EU's activities in different policy fields have to take account the impact they will have on the situation of women. This week the Parliament also discussed the development aid policies of 10 ex-communist countries from central and eastern Europe that have joined the Union since 2004. While all these countries have undertaken to allocate more than 0.1 percent of their gross national incomes to development aid by 2010, MEPs heard that many are struggling to honor that pledge. Polish MEP Filip Kaczamarek said that sub-Saharan Africa has been "neglected" by the EU's newest entrants. He argued that an education campaign is necessary to remedy the low level of public awareness about EU development aid in these countries. "Otherwise, tax payers are unlikely to go along with increasing aid," he said. The 10 countries are Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Hungary.