16th IACC

Global discourse on the fight against corruption has historically been gender neutral, but over the past few years, the Huairou Commission and UNDP PACDE have partnered to produce evidence of the gendered impacts of corruption, as well as support grassroots women’s groups design and implement strategies to increase transparency and accountability in their communities. In 2013, the Huairou Commission’s Transparency & Accountability Initiative, with the support of UNDP PACDE, implemented six grassroots women-led pilot projects on increasing accountability and transparency in the sectors of health care, water and sanitation, electricity, land, and national identification documents.

This session will highlight on the ground experiences of grassroots women’s organizations from Nepal and Uganda as they share the impacts of their pilot studies in the water, sanitation and land sectors, with specific focus on their basic political education trainings, monitoring tools and partnership strategies as key drivers of increasing accountability and decreasing misuse of resources and power. Representatives from national branches of Transparency International will also share regional citizen monitoring mechanisms and their lessons learned for increasing access to information and empowering community-led action.

The session seeks to facilitate dialogue between grassroots women, UN agencies, government officials, women judges, and other civil society stakeholders on how to support women’s strategies for holding local authorities accountable, and identify entry points at the local level for advancing women’s participation and gender equality. It will also build lessons on how best to refine and adapt these bottom-up strategies to influence national and international level anti-corruption policies and programming, as well as how citizen monitoring mechanisms can be integrated into the means of implementing the post-2015 development goals.