Bonjour, buenos dias, bom dia, Mr. Secretary General, Mr. Assistant Secretary General, Ambassador Durand, my fellow panelists, distinguished delegates to the OAS, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great delight for me to participate in this panel today. I am excited about what is being launched today because of the many years I have spent professionally in the Americas and because, as the preceding panelists have stressed, understanding the impact of gender inequality can help us plan and implement more sustainable projects. I would like to share with you Canadian experience in working with the principles of gender equality and in staff training.

• 1976 – Guidelines on Women in Development – based on the principles of "learn, do, revise"

• 1984 – CIDA’s first policy – Women in Development (WID) – and from the start encouragement that staff not look at equality of opportunity only, but equality of results – Aesop’s fable of the crane and the fox illustrates the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of results

• I spent 1984-87 in Colombia and came back to a changed CIDA – computers sprouting here and there and a concerted effort by CIDA to engage in a change in corporate culture related to implementing the new policy through a series of strategies lead by senior management

• A recognition that work on this issue required technical skills – that it was not sufficient to be a woman; that men can be and are champions for this issue

• recruitment of specialists with backgrounds in sociology, anthropology, education, and economics to advise staff

• We began in 1986 by making training compulsory for all staff.

• Once the training course had been piloted, CIDA’s executive committee demonstrated the Agency’s commitment by taking the full course together. With that precedent, all staff was gradually worked through the course. At the same time, we supported training for our partners so that they could develop their own skills.

I mentioned earlier how we build on the principles of "learn-do-revise". The courses at CIDA have changed over the years so that the course reflects the reality of the average CIDA officer and is concretely related to the work that he or she does.

• They should have a common vocabulary about gender equality, gender analysis, sex disaggregated data, monitoring and evaluation, etc

• They should understand how this relates to their work – how it affects the criteria for selection of a project or program, what it means in the design, implementation, and evaluation of projects.

• They should understand the need to collect data disaggregated by sex, age, and diversity.

• They should also know that they are not expected to be experts – so they should know when and where to go for help

Over the years, we have revised the course to reflect what we have learned from evaluations, from the evolving understanding of development in the international community – for example, what are the best practices for undertaking gender based analysis?

After the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, many of our partners, whether donors or recipients, revised their national policies to bring them more closely in line with the principles of "equality, development and peace" and with the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women. So in 1998, CIDA went out on the Internet in English, French and Spanish to ask women and men across Canada and in the global South to tell us what they liked about our policy and what they didn’t. The consultation over the internet lasted six weeks. We also looked at what our project evaluations told us ( again the principle of "learn, do, revise") and at what other donors were doing.

And came up with the policy that you will find on the CIDA web site (www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/equality) in all the languages of the OAS: we changed the goal of the policy to "equality between women and men" and focused on three objectives:

One is Human rights

- Discrimination against women persists in every country, constituting the biggest barrier to women’s ability to exercise their human rights. in many countries, women do not have equal rights with men in the following areas: ownership of property, freedom to travel, transferring nationality, divorce and custody of children, access to credit. This is both a social justice and an economic development issue.

One is about access to and control over the resources and benefits of development

- there is a tendency to think of gender equality as a "social" issue but let’s be frank -- inequality is grounded in economic inequality -- who inherits? who owns land? whose family must pay a dowry? Who gets access to income?

-- Because they generally have less formal education and technical training than men, women are more likely to be poor. For a number of reasons, women and men become poor and respond to poverty in different ways and as a group, women are more vulnerable to poverty's extremes. And because of women s important responsibility for maintaining the home and caring for children, this vulnerability often results in the transmission of this poverty to the next generation. Gender analysis reveals opportunities to address the structural causes of poverty which are specific to the lives of poor women and men.

And the final CIDA objective is about Decision-making:

- Democracy is threatened when a significant proportion of the population is not represented in the decision making process. Women are vastly underrepresented as participants and decision makers in government, business and social institutions, including the home. Consequently, women's perspectives are missing from many critical decisions which govern their lives and decide the futures of their communities.

So CIDA has been working with equality concepts for a long time and none of this has been easy: it's a crosscutting theme that needs to be incorporated into our understanding of just about everything. Our policy says to CIDA staff and partners: Instead of merely targeting women as recipients of aid, women's, as well as men’s, experiences can and should inform the design, implementation and evaluation of CIDA's policies, programs, and projects. And that gender equality is a development issue in and of itself.

We start from the premise that paying attention to gender equality issues and looking at our planning with a gender lens improves the quality of the design, lessens the risks because we know more about the context in which our investment is undertaken, and increases the potential for poverty reduction. And we don't do this only because it is a social justice goal. We do it because it makes hard bottom line sense.

Cecilia Valdivieso has outlined for you the findings of the World Bank "Engendering Development" a policy research report that looked at gender inequality at the start of the 21st century.

Jim Wolfensohn, President of the Bank, wrote in the Preface "Large gender disparities in basic human rights, in resources and economic opportunity, and political voice are pervasive around the world - in spite of recent gains".

I had one of those AHA moments when I read "Engendering Development" and matched the World Bank’s 3 issues (basic human rights, access to resources and economic opportunity, political voice) to each of the 3 CIDA policy objectives (realization of human rights, access to and control over resources, and participation in decision-making) that we had identified in 1998.

A 2001 study by the American Institute for Women's Policy Research shows that overall American women are more likely to participate in civic and community activities than men are and that women who feel safe in their neighbourhoods are 75 percent more likely to play active roles. So in the US, just as in the rest of the Americas, making women feel safe and welcome has a dramatically beneficial effect on social engagement and on community development. But in many countries, gender inequalities and insecurity limit women's participation in public spaces. To make safe neighbourhoods where both women and men can speak and act without fear requires work on peacebuilding, conflict resolution, legislation, police training, culturally sensitive attitude change management, strengthened courts, all of which require time, money, and political will.

What are the costs of not making a public space for women's voices?

- there's a cost to the health of democracy

- there's a cost associated with the quality of policy decisions when only the voices of the powerful or the in crowd are listened to

So whether we’re talking about human rights, resources and economic opportunity, or political voice, equality issues are in effect key issues related to democratization, economic growth and growth with equity and the realization of human rights for all. They relate to the fundamentals of how we live today and the vision we have for tomorrow. That is why we are delighted to partner the OAS and the CIM as you embark on a process of developing the strategies to mainstream gender equality in your work.