These are some of the conclusions stated in the investigation of the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) The integration of gender equality in Norwegian development aid to Nicaragua and Uganda, Document no. 3:11 (2005-2006), submitted to the Storting on 7 September.
The objective of the OAG’s investigation has been to assess whether the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and NORAD have mainstreamed gender in development aid to Nicaragua and Uganda. According to the UN millennium development goals, it is necessary to promote gender equality and to empower women in order to attain the main goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. One of the chief objectives of Norwegian development aid cooperation is to help to strengthen women’s rights and their opportunities to participate actively and on the same level as men in the economic, social, political and cultural aspects of community life. This objective is to be attained by gender mainstreaming all aspects of development cooperation.
The investigation is based on 20 projects financed by Norway in areas where efforts to achieve greater gender equality can be expected: education, health, economic participation and human rights.
Although most of the projects can show results in the field of gender equality, the gender aspect is often poorly mainstreamed into the design of the projects. The projects report on areas that concern women and gender equality, but the quality of the reporting varies.
In general, the projects’ documentation of the final phase rarely contains a comprehensive assessment of either gender aspects or the experience of working on gender equality. Deficient documentation also reduces the chance of experience being communicated to others, thus depriving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and NORAD of a major opportunity to improve Norwegian development aid.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs views the OAG’s investigation as important input for future work on mainstreaming gender aspects into development cooperation, and the Ministry is of the opinion that the conclusions of the investigation will be extremely useful for the compilation of the action plan for development cooperation that will be specifically targeted at women and gender equality.
The document (in Norwegian) can be downloaded from this website or ordered from Akademika booksellers, tel. +47 22 18 81 23.
The provision concerning delayed public access to documents that are compiled by or sent to the Office of the Auditor General in connection with Document no. 3:11 has been repealed, cf. Section 18, paragraph 2 of the Auditor General Act.