UNIFEM’s framework for action on Women, Peace and Security

Peace-building: UNIFEM will continue to support capacity-building of women’s peace networks and Civil Societies’ Organizations (CSOs). This will enable women to seize opportunities for early engagement in peace building and post-conflict governance, and to exert leverage when demanding accountability for implementing 1325. UNIFEM will continue to advocate for gender awareness in conflict prevention and peace-building institutions on national, regional and global scales. It will move from awareness-raising about gender-specific experiences of conflict to strengthening accountability mechanisms to hold authorities answerable for the extent to which they include women, respond to their needs, and build a gender-equal peace.

Enhancing Security: UNIFEM will target two institutional arenas that are critical to assuring human security: the judicial sector and the security sector. Its Gender Justice programming will not only support efforts to end impunity for sexual and gender-based violence in conflict, but will support efforts to address the wider range of women’s post-conflict justice needs, including truth-telling and reconciliation, and inheritance and property rights to enable them to build economic security. UNIFEM’s Security Sector Reform programming will support institutional reforms to hold police and other security services accountable for maintaining a gender-equal form of public safety. Programming will include not only pilot efforts to alter incentive systems, performance measures, and recruitment methods, but strengthening women’s participation in the democratic oversight of security forces.

Underpinning both areas will be efforts to enhance accountability of all actors involved in peace building activities through strengthening of the ‘demand-side’ of accountability (constituencies demanding gender equality in peace processes and post-conflict recovery), and the ‘supply-side’ of accountability (gender-sensitive institutional reforms in peace-building, judicial, and security organizations).  More information on UNIFEM’s framework for programming can be accessed here.

UNIFEM’s Peace and Security Programming from 2001-2006 supported women’s organizations to participate in peace negotiations, community reconciliation and conflict prevention, advocated for better responses from the international humanitarian and peace-keeping community to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV); and supported legal and constitutional reform and gender justice in post-conflict contexts. This programming experience has yielded several insights that inspire the three areas above:

• Women must be involved in peace building processes as early as possible to build their legitimacy as participants;
• Gender-specific social constraints (time and care burdens, mobility restrictions, lack of assets, and vulnerability to gender-based violence) must be addressed and remedied in order to make women’s participation more effective;
• Women’s capacity to participate in post-conflict public decision-making is predicated on gender-sensitive reforms in electoral systems, judicial systems, security systems, legislatures and local councils.