Gender equality and women’s empowerment have been gaining increasing importance for IFAD – both as objectives and as instruments for poverty reduction. IFAD’s commitment is visible in its operations, where three main dimensions are considered: economic empowerment by enhancing women’s access to and control over productive resources; strengthening their participation in public decision-making processes; and enhancing rural people’s well-being by improving their access to basic rural infrastructure and services.

IFAD’s Gender Plan of Action 2003-2006: “Mainstreaming a gender perspective in IFAD’s operations” was conceived as an instrument for operationalizing the principles and objectives of the Strategic Framework for IFAD 2002-2006. Regional gender strategies were also prepared and identified gender as a cross-cutting theme for operations.

For the last decade, IFAD has been implementing regional and country-specific grant-funded support programmes for gender mainstreaming and women’s empowerment in its operations.These have been financed with IFAD resources and Supplementary Funds from Germany, Italy, Japan and Norway.  After several years of implementation and requests from different stakeholders, a self-evaluation process was launched to take stock of the various experiences gathered. Simultaneously, in 2005, the mid-term review of IFAD’s Gender Plan of Action 2003-2006 was undertaken to measure progress made.

The conclusions of these review exercises provide a backdrop for assessing IFAD’s work in terms of gender mainstreaming and for highlighting the most salient lessons arising from implementation. A decision on the way forward is now pressing, in the context of the new IFAD Strategic Framework 2011-2015 and other institutional change processes currently under way.