Building on its achievements in previous years, UN-REDD continued to support 16 countries in 2018 to advance the cross-cutting, comprehensive integration of gender equality and women’s empowerment principles into nationally led REDD+ action. This support has been integrated across REDD+ thematic areas and has helped ensure that gender equality and women’s empowerment perspectives are incorporated into REDD+ action at both the national and subnational levels.
At the national level, within Colombia’s National Strategy on Forests (“Bosques, Territorios de Vida”) gender equality is noted as one of the guiding principles and gender and women’s empowerment considerations are integrated into the activities and indicators of various lines of action. Additionally, guidance was provided to Peru on how to incorporate a gender approach into its proposed Climate Change Law and its 2018–2020 Stakeholder Participation Plan. Meanwhile, assistance provided to Honduras resulted in the elaboration, validation and launch of the institutional Gender Strategy for the Ministry of Energy, Natural Resources, Environment and Mines. With UN-REDD support, Bangladesh, Colombia and Myanmar undertook gender-specific analysis to help promote the integration of a gender approach and increase women’s active participation within nationally led REDD+ action. Other countries are ensuring that gender, as a cross-cutting topic, is incorporated into REDD+ thematic areas. For example, Mongolia integrated a gender-responsive approach approach into its Stakeholder Engagement Handbook, the Republic of the Congo incorporated gender perspectives within its REDD+ Investment Plan and Mexico included gender- and youth-specific recommendations within its legal analysis of emissions reductions ownership.
In 2018, UN-REDD support also contributed to women’s active involvement in REDD+ action on the ground. In Viet Nam, through a collaborative effort with women and men from ethnic minorities and private companies in Lao Cai on traditional herbal medicinal products, ethnic minority women are seeing positive changes to their livelihoods, both in terms of income as well as access to markets. Similarly, in Chile, efforts to integrate a gender approach into the planning and implementation of ecological restoration activities has helped 20 women from the Ovalle community to actively participate and engage in these activities.
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 policy- dialogue 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.
Lastly, in 2018, the UN-REDD Programme made steady progress in building internal capacity to apply its new Gender Marker Rating System for the 2018–2020 Technical Assistance Programme. With the objective of building the capacity of colleagues to integrate gender into their work as well as to monitor and report how such actions contribute to achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women, an in-person training took place at FAO headquarters in November Additional internal capacity-building efforts, planned in late 2018, have been rolled out in early 2019 to reach UN-REDD colleagues based in Latin America, Africa and Asia-Pacific.
With this one The UN-REDD Methodological Brief on Gender has been translated into Spanish and French.