Strengthening gender equality policy infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region

Recently, gender has been emphasized in the discussions of international development cooperation as a cross-cutting issue. Korea's official development assistance (ODA) has rapidly advanced, but its gender sector is still lagging behind. Neither is budget allocation for gender projects sufficient, nor is gender fully mainstreamed in Korea's ODA. Thus, strengthening gender projects and mainstreaming gender are the key to the progress of Korea's ODA. To fill this gap, Korean Women's Development Institute (KWDI) started a multi-year ODA project for strengthening gender equality policy infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific in 2011. This research is based on the result of the first year project targeted at Cambodia and Indonesia. It entails policy recommendations for gender projects aimed at the Asian-Pacific countries, to ultimately contribute to the advancement of Korea's ODA as a catalyst of gender policy development. Gender policy experts' capacity can be seen as infrastructure for gender equality policy based on the Human Capital Theory and Amartya Sen's Human Capability Approach. Training workshops can be utilized as an effective tool to develop the experts' capacity in developing countries. To maximize the effects of the capacity building workshop, it is also critical to design strong gender policy networks. After analyzing the existing gender policy training programs, the results indicate that there are several implications for further development. The multilateral agencies such as UNIFEM, ITC/ILO and World Bank showed more sophisticated workshop modules including higher standard of ample teaching materials and topics for the lecturers when compared to the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA)'s training workshops. The Workshops hosted by KOICA usually operate by assigning proxy agencies, but their participation in decision-making process and sustainable partnership with the participants after the workshop are too limited. Thus, workshops for gender policy requires to follow higher qualities that of the international organizations to overcome current limitations. The first two target countries of KWDI's ODA project―Cambodia and Indonesia differ in many aspects, which clearly reflects the economic, political, and socio-cultural diversity of the Asia-Pacific countries. Therefore, thorough examination on the local needs for gender equality policy is required prior to designing of the workshop. Based on the results of preliminary research and local consultation meetings on gender policy in Cambodia and Indonesia, three topic areas were selected as electives for the KWDI workshop: women's economic empowerment, women's political empowerment, and women's human rights including anti-violence against women. KWDI's workshop for capacity building of gender policy experts in 2011 gained a great success in terms of participant satisfaction. This results from efforts to help the experts take their own initiatives in developing capacity and building gender policy network for sustainable growth in both countries. First, the workshop program was tailored to local needs as KWDI worked closely with local gender experts from the beginning of the project. Also, during the workshop, participants could develop concrete action plans on topics of their interest, and build policy network in each country that consisted of experts from government, NGOs and academia. Thus, these success factors should be considered when developing workshop modules for the capacity building of gender policy experts.