ReCom results meeting - Aid for Gender Equality

Aid for Gender Equality


In recent decades, aid donors have recognised that gender equality and women’s empowerment are central to improving living standards, well-being, and economic growth. This insight has led to a fourfold increase in the flows of foreign aid toward gender equality related initiatives, from USD 6.5 to 25.5 billion from 2002 to 2011. Yet, donors, policymakers and academics have not paid much attention to the impact of foreign aid in promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment on broad development outcomes or on outcomes for women, girls, men and boys.

The ReCom results meeting ‘Aid for Gender Equality’ will bring together leading experts in gender issues, alongside development professionals from bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, parliamentarians from the Nordic countries, members of the international NGO community as well as policy makers from aid-supported developing countries.

The goal of the results meeting is two-fold:

  1. To present and disseminate the conclusions of studies on the relationship between donor assistance and changes in gender equality and female empowerment; and
  2. To discuss the future role of foreign aid in promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment within the post-2015 context. 

ReCom - Research and Communication on Foreign Aid is a 3-year, internationally oriented research programme implemented by UNU-WIDER, with financial support from Sida and Danida, that aims to provide cutting-edge evidence about ‘what works’, ‘what could work’, ‘what is scalable’, and ‘what is transferable’ in the area of development cooperation, and to communicate this to the wider public. ReCom focuses on five themes: growth and employment; governance and fragility; gender equality; environment and climate change; and the social sectors. Synergies exist across these areas, and poverty reduction cuts across all five themes.