New UNIDO gender mainstreaming guide launched
August 05, 2021
With the financial support of the Government of Finland, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) has launched its new “UNIDO Guide to Gender Analysis and Gender Mainstreaming the Project Cycle”, which aims to facilitate the efficient and effective integration of gender considerations throughout industrial development projects.
“More than a third of all UNIDO projects and programmes approved in 2020 are expected to at least significantly contribute to gender equality and the empowerment of women”, said UNIDO Director General LI Yong. “The Guide will help us increase this even further to ensure women and men can equally lead, participate in, and benefit from industrial development.”
In a subsequent panel discussion, government representatives and UNIDO shared how the Guide can be applied to their areas of work, including to scale-up gender equality results of UNIDO’s technical cooperation projects. The Guide also informs on how normative and convening projects, as well as UNIDO’s flagship Country Programmes (CPs) and Programmes for Country Partnership (PCPs), can be designed in a gender-responsive manner.
“One of our key learnings is the fact that a very targeted, well-informed, evidence-based gender analysis is a must,“ highlighted UNIDO Gender Coordinator a.i. Müge Dolun.
The benefits of mainstreaming gender were also highlighted by Adrine Muchimba, Director of Corporate Services at the Zambia Metrology Agency, which benefited from UNIDO’s technical assistance in the field of quality infrastructure, including a gender audit and gender analysis to mainstream gender in policies, operations, capacity-building, advocacy, recruitment and enabling environment measures.
“This Gender audit and analysis presented an opportunity for us to understand better gender mainstreaming, and it also helped the institution to identify the gaps that existed,” said Muchimba. “All these activities that we were doing have an input into the attainment of this vision.”
The Guide complements and builds on UNIDO’s numerous gender mainstreaming guides, including on agri-business, climate change or trade capacity-building; it will be essential in the further implementation of UNIDO’s Gender Strategy for 2020 to 2023 and will help UNIDO continuously scale up its delivery of gender equality results across all industrial development projects in its Member States.
“We are convinced that the advancements in gender equality and the empowerment of women will lead also to improved industrial development outcomes,” said Ambassador Pirkko Hämäläinen, Permanent Representative of Finland to the United Nations in Vienna. “UNIDO is one of Finland’s key multilateral trade and development partners.”
Download your digital copy of the Guide here