Lamia El-Fattal Masadiah, WOCAN Liaison Officer in Washington DC, attended ‘Looking Back, Looking Forward: Gender Integration and Women’s Empowerment at USAID,’ at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, on January 8, 2013. The one and half hour meeting was sponsored by The Middle East Program at the Wilson Center and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The program included three presentations by Christina Tchen, Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Ambassador Donald Steinberg, Deputy Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development and Carla Koppell, Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality & Women’s Empowerment. These presentations were followed by a panel discussion among USAID senior staff, led by Paul Weisenfeld, Assistant to the Administrator, Bureau for Food Security and included Sarah Mendelson, Deputy Assistant Administrator, Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance; Caren Grown, Senior Gender advisor, Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning and Kay Freeman, Director, Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment and Carla Koppell.
The presentations and panel discussion emphasized USAID’s most recent all-out aggressive thrust to pay more attention to gender in development. There is a strong commitment to support gender concerns not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because the return on investment in women and gender equality is high. The support for gender equality and women’s empowerment at USAID has strong policy backing from both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. Not only have new senior positions for gender equality and women’s empowerment been created at USAID, but gender concerns in development have also been addressed through the creation of new centers at USAID (such as the Center for Democracy and Governance) and other gender units in the USA (at the federal level) and in missions abroad. Gender champions have been identified. USAID is seeking new and technologically savvy ways to support gender equality. An example includes a cell phone application which, when pointed at a product, can measure how much trafficked labor was involved in the manufacturing of the product. USAID is now at the cusp of full implementation of their newly designed gender equality and women’s empowerment program which they want to put in practice in partnership with other governments and other donors. There is now the need to implement in the program and collect the evidence to show the higher return on investment in women and girls and measure the impact of this effort.