Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-17-Speech-3-309"
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"en.20031217.11.3-309"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, Article 3 of the Treaty sets out the European Community’s desire to ban all forms of inequality and to promote equality between men and women. The Council has mentioned gender equality as the basis for development cooperation. In Beijing, a 10-point action programme on this has been adopted and has been signed by all countries. The situation still leaves a great deal to be desired, not least in the area of development cooperation. Of the approximately 1.5 billion people who live under the poverty line, 70% are women. Not only are they lacking financial resources, but also, in most cases they have to go without social rights, such as the right to proper food, drinking water, education, health care and fundamental human rights.
Since the Council has defined gender mainstreaming as the guiding principle for development cooperation policy, disappointingly little has actually happened. That is why I welcome the action programme. It should give gender equality in development cooperation policy an extra shot in the arm. Reference has already been made, in this House’s debates and documents, to the link between poverty and gender inequality. The countries where there is great inequality between men and women are also the poorest. There is less poverty in countries where inequality between men and women is not so pronounced. The success rate of development projects in the fields of health care, literacy schemes and agriculture, for example, appears higher if women are involved. Investing in girls appears to lead to lower child mortality and mortality among women, offers higher food safety and means an improvement in the fight against poverty. This is not, unfortunately, common knowledge, and so I was pleased with the publication of research by UNICEF on 11 December last, which clearly underlined this. The report, in fact, states that without measures to get more girls into schools, it will be impossible to achieve the millennium objectives. It is apparent that more girls attending school not only benefits them, but also boys and their countries. The report describes that gender discrimination stops developments in their tracks. The report also describes that, barring a few exceptions, the industrialised countries and international financial institutions have failed to make good their own promises.
Hence my support for the action programme which aims to promote analysis and integration of the gender aspect in the priority areas of Community development cooperation, horizontal integration of the gender aspect in projects and programmes, and the advancement of gender capacity in the European Community itself. These are three important points, particularly the last one: a change of mentality is needed, not least in the bodies of the European Union itself. In the light of the urgency and opportunities, I am backing the amendment to increase the budget from EUR 9 million to EUR 11 million. I sincerely hope that the Commission will be able to agree to this."@en1
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