UNDP Samoa Multi-Country Office (MCO) affirms its commitment to a strategy of mainstreaming gender across all areas of its work for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment, with gender as a cross-cutting issue rather than a separate practice. The MCO has, as its aim, strengthening the capacity to mainstream and institutionalise a gender perspective in each of the core practices within the MCO: democratic governance and poverty reduction, environment and energy, and crisis prevention, recovery and disaster management.
It is increasingly recognised that to achieve sustainable human development (SHD), the MCO must be committed to mainstreaming a gender perspective into all its core practices to benefit both men and women. Society stipulates different roles to women and men in different social contexts. Consequently, differing opportunities and resources may be available to women and men. There are also gender differences in their ability and power to make decisions. Gender roles and unequal gender relations interact with other social and economic variables, resulting in diverse and inequitable patterns of development. Therefore, for development to benefit both women and men of the Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, and Tokelau, the MCO can no longer assume that women’s and men’s needs and priorities in development are the same. Sustainable human development is not gender neutral.
Responding to this, the MCO will, as a matter of policy, mainstream gender into all aspects of its work. This will lead to increased coverage, effectiveness, and efficiency of the impact of development interventions for women, the girl child, men, and the boy child.
The goal of this Strategy is to contribute to a mainstreaming strategy for the MCO prepared and incorporated into all key development programmes, with clear accountability, and targets. The MCO intends to work closely with UNIFEM and other UN Agencies to build the capacity of UN staff in gender mainstreaming.
One example of our activities in this area will be the specialised gender mainstreaming training provided for National Strategic Planners/MDG Advisors that will be placed in the Cook Islands and Niue, to strengthen their capacity for mainstreaming gender into National Strategic Development Plans.