Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon.
Given Oxfam's focus on women's rights, we are particularly pleased to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. We applaud the committee for taking on this timely study of Canada and the women, peace, and security resolutions.
Oxfam is an international confederation working in 90 countries to support long-term development, humanitarian assistance, and advocacy and campaigns to address the root causes of poverty and vulnerability. In everything we do, we put gender justice and women's rights at the centre.
Oxfam is involved in programs and projects around the world that support women, peace, and security objectives. To name just a few, the young women peace-builders program in Colombia brings together young women to discuss and learn from each other's experiences. Together they are developing a national strategy to create a culture of peace in Colombia and present their ideas to the government. In Myanmar, Oxfam supports the women's initiative network for peace, which brings together women's organizations from diverse ethnic groups to support women's engagement in peace processes. In Afghanistan, our project trains both men and women on the importance of women's participation in society and on ways for women to access the formal justice system.
Last autumn the global community celebrated the 15th anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. One of the overwhelming conclusions of these discussions was that progress on the ground has been disappointing. It's clear that implementation has lagged behind commitments.
How can Canada play a leadership role on women, peace, and security? Oxfam has identified six global areas for action. In each of these areas I have recommendations for Canadian priorities and actions.
First, we note the importance of international support for women's meaningful participation and leadership in all peace processes, in the security and justice system sectors, and in post-conflict reconstruction. A growing body of research documents how, when women are involved in peace processes, there is a greater chance of success, yet these processes continue to be closed to women and women's organizations. In recent years only 4% of signatories, 2.4% of chief mediators, 3.7% of witnesses, and nine negotiators were women. In Canada we could mobilize diplomatic support to ensure that women's organizations participate in a meaningful way in the Syrian peace talks, for example, and in all other peace processes. Canada could also provide support and training to these organizations so that they can increase their effectiveness.
The second area for attention is increased financing from donors and governments for implementing the women, peace, and security agenda. According to the United Nations, although there is a great deal of rhetoric supporting women, peace, and security, funding for programs and processes remains abysmally low across all areas of the agenda. This is a key dimension of leadership, so I have several recommendations.
First, increase the percentage of our development assistance in crisis contexts and our humanitarian spending that addresses women's needs and targets gender equality as its primary, principal objective. The United Nations has adopted a specific target for this type of spending. Their goal, as Jacquie said, is to have 15% of peace-building initiatives with women's rights and gender equality as their principal objective. Right now, the reports on Canada's action plan for implementing the women, peace, and security agenda don't provide this figure, so we do not even know what Canada is investing in and whether or not this amount has increased or decreased as a result of the action plan.
Second, we need to provide multi-year core funding and sizable grants for women's organizations. We need to ensure that the next iteration of the national action plan is fully resourced with a clear budget and human resource allocations. Our current plan has no dedicated budget.
Our third area is more effective prevention of and responses to gender-based violence in crisis contexts. Globally this includes tackling the socio-political causes of gender-based violence, more support for gender-sensitive security sector reform, implementation of the arms trade treaty, and gender-sensitive strategies for countering terrorism and extremism.
In recent years, Canada has spoken out, at the G8 and other international forums, on gender-based violence in conflict. We applaud the funding of various initiatives, including support for the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. However, we believe Canada's investments in this area would yield stronger results with a clear strategy and greater investments in women's grassroots organizations.
One area of disappointment to many global organizations has been Canada's failure to fund the full range of sexual and reproductive health services, including those relating to pregnancy during crisis. We are encouraged to note that the mandate letters to the relevant ministers include direction for a progressive stand on sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Our fourth area for attention is the importance of effectively addressing women's needs, rights, and roles in humanitarian responses. Oxfam's been working for several years to increase the profile and role played by women's organizations in humanitarian response. We're committed to promoting gender equality and women's rights in our humanitarian response by consulting with women, ensuring our programming is safe, and working with women's organizations from the start of the crisis to ensure that women's and men's different needs are understood and met equitably.
For example, we work with women to guide the design of the programs, from ensuring that the locations of water points are easily accessed, that communal latrines are safely separated and have locks, and that bathing and clothes-washing facilities are private. Hygiene messages for men and women, boys and girls, also need to be different. Oxfam tries to ensure hygiene or dignity kits contain pads so that women can manage their monthly periods in comfort and in dignity.
Our staff also co-authored and recently participated in the Canadian launch of the new guidelines for integrating gender-based violence interventions in humanitarian action. To more effectively address women's needs, rights, and roles in humanitarian response, Canada could take concrete and specific measures to strengthen women's participation in humanitarian assistance, protection, and recovery programs. We could strengthen the capacity of partner governments to address gender equality and gender-based violence in national disaster risk reduction strategies and programs, require sex and age disaggregated data in all emergency response initiatives, and provide funding for training on the gender-based violence guidelines.
Our fifth area is greater international attention to conflict prevention and tackling the root causes of conflict. This is one area where the national action plan was particularly weak. One of the key insights of the women, peace and security agenda is that supporting women's leadership is a key lever in building more sustainable and peaceful societies.
In terms of Canadian priorities, this involves emphasizing conflict prevention and the role of women activists and women's rights organizations in conflict prevention in the revised national action plan, providing increased support to women's rights organizations working on peace-building, and ensuring that all efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism include agenda perspective.
Our sixth and final area is related to the effective implementation and accountability for women, peace and security commitments by the United Nations and member states. Bridging the gap between rhetoric and implementation requires stronger monitoring and accountability. In Canada's case our national action plan does have some positive features. It was the first national action plan to include indicators and assign responsibility for specific actions, but we could create new, much improved second-generation action plans.
First, we need an action plan that has ambitious priorities that are grounded in a rights-based perspective. The Canadian national action plan should outline how Canada will address the previous five issues I've highlighted.
Second, the independent mid-term review of the plan found that it doesn't seem to have a significant impact on Canada's overall policy direction with respect to conflict-affected and fragile states. This is an enormous weakness and requires efforts to increase its profile, including through the World Humanitarian Summit.
As mentioned earlier, we need a dedicated budget, including significant multi-year, consistent resources for women's rights organizations. We need to include a results focus. The current Canadian national action plan reports tend to focus on outlining activities, and there's little effort to understand if these activities are leading to much needed change on the ground.
Finally, we need to improve reporting. The progress reports on the national action plan have been consistently late, raising questions about the priority given to the plan within the government. Although the progress reports are full of details, they do not outline a clear picture of progress, challenges, and lessons.
In conclusion, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2122 stated that UN member states were deeply concerned about persistent implementation deficits in the women, peace and security agenda. It's time to move from deep concern to effective action. Canada has played a role, but this role has not been one of a global leader. It has not been commensurate with our national and international commitments to gender equality and women's rights. Our rhetoric has not been backed by sufficient resources and expenditures of diplomatic capital. We have the chance to change this. We urge this committee to recommend a bold and ambitious agenda for Canada, an agenda backed by resources, and an agenda that puts women at the centre of peace building.
Thank you.