Source: The Guardian
Despite the rhetoric on eradicating sexual violence in conflict, there are few signs of a commensurate increase in donor funding for programmes to protect women. Meanwhile, a lack of accurate data on what's being spent where is hindering efforts to monitor and evaluate what is working.

                                                                                                                                                    Photograph: Eric Lafforgue/Getty Images

From the adoption of UN Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security in 2000, to the 2013 call to action that saw donors and international agencies commit to reducing violence against women in emergencies, and last year's high-profile conference on violence against women in London, there is no lack of talk about what needs to be done.

But figuring out whether words have been matched by funding is difficult. Campaigners say the use of gender markers to categorise funding according to its role in promoting gender equality is not widespread enough, nor are the available tools sufficiently detailed.

At present, there is no way to monitor spending devoted specifically to preventing sexual violence in conflict, although the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development plans to introduce a new code to track such flows later this year.

Until now, this funding was only identified as part of aid for gender equality, and even that is hard to measure. A number of gender markers exist and, while they do not capture everything, they do give some idea of the amounts involved and the recipient countries.

Emily Esplen, lead policy analyst on gender equality and women's rights at the OECD's Development Cooperation Directorate, said more than 90% of bilateral aid given by OECD members was screened against the group's gender marker. "It's a strong indication of the degree of political will from a particular government for supporting gender equality through their aid programmes," she said.

"We're at a time where there are unprecedented policy commitments around gender equality and gender-based violence and you are getting a lot of donors saying, 'This is one of our top priorities for our whole aid programme' ... but there's always this question of – are you actually going to back that up?"

Outside the OECD, other markers are used, but the empirical evidence they offer can be patchy.

In a report in September 2014 on Funding Gender Emergencies, the Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) programme, run by Development Initiatives, looked at funding from the top 10 donors between 2011 and 2014. The report highlighted an "unreliable picture" of whether commitments to gender equality had been met.

"Reporting on gender remains poor – both in terms of using the gender marker in the first place (only two-fifths of humanitarian assistance was coded in 2013) and, where the gender marker has been used, specifying the extent to which the project contributes to gender equality," the report said.

Since 2012, there have been no notable improvements in the use of the gender marker by donors, the report said. The gender marker tool was introduced in 2010 by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee to track gender funding in UN appeals; the report said the IASC marker should be applied systematically to each project reported to the UN's Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) financial tracking service (FTS).

On the basis of the available data, the GHA found that the proportion of aid allocated to projects that focused "principally" or "contribute significantly" to gender equality decreased from 22% in 2013 to 19% in 2014.

The European commission's humanitarian aid and civil protection (Echo) department has also introduced a gender-age marker to assess the extent to which humanitarian actions integrate gender and age considerations. It came into effect for all Echo projects in January 2014.

But no marker provides an overview of global aid flows, and this hampers monitoring and evaluation as well as making it more difficult for donors to coordinate efficiently.

Last September, in a progress report on commitments made during the 2013 Call to Action, Ocha said: "Inadequacies of collection and utilisation of sex and age disaggregated data and information remains as an overarching challenge for Ocha and the humanitarian system." The information gap "continues to compromise holistic gender analysis and identification of differential concerns, risks and threats facing women, girls, boys and men", the report added.

Bridging this gap is critical as world leaders work on a new set of goals to define the development agenda until 2030 – the sustainable development goals (SDGs) – and figure out how to finance the comprehensive list of targets. The draft SDGs, which will be finalised at a summit in New York in September, call for the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls, including trafficking and sexual exploitation.

For Esplen, the drafting of the SDGs represents a huge opportunity. "It's highly likely there is going to be a target in there on GBV [gender-based violence], and there is going to be a huge push for strong mechanisms," she said. "There might only be one or two indicators agreed on violence against women, and they are unlikely to be specific to sexual violence – but those are an entry point to say we have targets and indicators that have been agreed to apply to all countries universally. We need some kind of very simple tool that tracks accountability."

Esplen's team has drawn up a code to allow OECD members to specify if projects help end violence against women and girls. The proposal has received widespread support from members and will be adopted later this year.

"What it won't be able to do is disaggregate whether that aid is going to sexual violence, or female genital mutilation, or domestic violence. We might be able to get a sense of that by going into the data ... but it'll give us a sense generally about what amount of money we are talking about and which donors are giving it," Esplen said.