UNDP efforts to mainstream gender and support women’s empowerment in its programmes and operations have been extensive and comprehensive. Development partners acknowledged UNDP contributions to gender equality in the country, both through its programmes and its consistent cross-cutting advocacy work for women’s rights and gender equality. UNDP has invested in GEWE capacity development for its team. UNDP does not have a dedicated gender advisor or specialist, but gender mainstreaming is coordinated by the Gender Focal Team led by the Resident Representative and designated gender focal points at project level. Gender parity has been met in the structure of the country office staff. In 2017, the country office received the Gold Gender Seal, scoring positively on 78 out of 80 benchmarks recognizing the achievements of UNDP Moldova in GEWE.147 In collaboration with UN Women, gender seal implementation in public institutions in now being planned with the Ministry of Defence and six selected local governments. According to the Gender Marker score, used to track expenditure towards gender mainstreaming, most of the projects in this CPD (amounting $45 million) contributed to GEN2, and only a fraction (amounting to $1 million) were marked as contributors to GEN3.148 Most of the GEN2 projects were under Outcome 2, and the majority of Outcome 1 projects were GEN 1 and GEN3. Outcome 3 had a balanced distribution between GEN1 and GEN2 projects (Figure 4). The country office faces some challenges to track the attributed gender budget due to the rigidity of Atlas, the UNDP resource planning system, and the classifications of GEN markers.149
FIGURE 4. Gender Marker by projects and outcomes GEN 0 Outcome 1
7
14
Outcome 2 Outcome 3
4 6
GEN 1
GEN 2
GEN 3
4
15 7
1
Source: UNDP Atlas PowerBI, June 2021
147
148
149
UNDP (2017) Gender Equality Seal, Certificate Report. Gender Seal is an independent assessment of UNDP commitment, expertise and effectiveness in protecting and advancing women’s rights and gender equality. GEN 3 refers to activities that have gender equality as a principal objective; GEN 2 activities have gender equality as a significant objective and GEN 1 activities are expected to contribute in some way to gender equality, but not significantly. For example, a statistics project is classified as GEN3, the project has done work on SDG gender-related indicators, gender-sensitive data and a study of women’s entrepreneurship but these were only some of the products, but gender was not the main focus. In other cases, like the Women’s Caucus in Parliament was a clear GEN3 project but the budget was very small, and UNDP considers it as seed funding to develop a more comprehensive project in partnership with UN Women and other partners.
Chapter 2. Findings
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