Gender Strategy

Initiatives will include seeking to provide a platform that will enable macroeconomic coordination to be viewed through a gender lens; and promote equal economic opportunities for women and other groups.

Initiatives will include promoting gender-responsive safe internal mobility and lifelong skills.

Initiatives will include supporting the ASEAN in its work in education; pursuing the inclusion of formal technical and vocational education and training; including gender targets in employment and training for infrastructure investments with employment opportunities; and promoting links to local education institutions and partnerships.

Initiatives will support investment in equal employment opportunities at all levels in special economic zones (SEZ), through incorporating core labor standards in SEZ projects as well as gender-responsive human resource policies, such as child care, access to health care, part-time work and flexible working hours for all employees.

Initiatives will seek to enhance partnerships with the private sector, NGOs, and financiers to facilitate access and connection to the use of digital technology by marginalized groups in society through financing and training programs; and identify opportunities to support women in technical and leadership roles in digital technology and e-commerce and to provide pathways for entering information and communication technology fields direct from education or existing employment.

Initiatives will include conducting GMS Program activities to promote inclusion and change attitudes to gender norms that operate to favor one group over another.

Initiatives will include promotion of specific interventions—particularly in remote areas with ethnic minority populations or where migrant populations transit or congregate—to enhance access to health services for women and other marginalized groups, and opportunities to share experiences and develop regional responses to increasing reproductive health care services, education and advice and institutional capacity development on the links between health and gender.

Initiatives will include targeted actions to encourage women to participate in decision-making and employment around energy sector investments.

Initiatives will include promotion of gender-sensitive transport infrastructure design; provision of well-lit public areas to respond to concerns for safety of movement; working together with transport and logistics operators to improve gender-sensitive customer services to enhance the utility of the infrastructure for all users.

Initiatives will include enhancing women’s participation in regional decision making on natural resources, environmental management, and disaster response committees and activities, applying gender-sensitive approaches to adaptation and mitigation programs to reduce the impact of climate shocks and environmental degradation on women.

Initiatives will include pursuing institutional gender mainstreaming activities with energy utilities and with national and municipal transport entities to implement modern gender-equitable human resource management practices and policies.

Initiatives will include GMS trade programs that will target issues encountered by female cross-border traders and female-owned enterprises, using the convening power of the GMS to support the development of gender-responsive regional financial and business development solutions; as well as promoting development of gender assessments to map trade impacts and women’s specific trade activities.

Initiatives will include supporting the extension of female-centered agriculture extension projects to help women to scale-up production and promotion of initiatives to increase women’s formal participation and decision-making roles in agricultural bodies and in public life.

Initiatives will include enhancing access to information and work to open up more tourism employment opportunities to women and local communities; promoting specific initiatives for women who participate in tourism employment cross-border migrant flows; supporting activities aimed at improving the skills and qualifications of women working in tourism; enhancing the inclusion of female leadership and entrepreneurship features in GMS tourism projects; and supporting prevention, reporting, and risk mitigation activities in tourism and civil works projects in tourism areas.

Initiatives will include promotion of institutional gender mainstreaming to accelerate the responsiveness of urban services to female users, and increase the percentage of the urban management workforce that is female; supporting activities that promote women’s participation and leadership in urban planning; and addressing specific challenges in urban environments.

Initiatives will include inclusion of initiatives for female-led business startups in GMS projects in other sectors; partnership in events to increase women traders’ knowledge of markets and regulatory requirements and to create partnerships with private sector partners for low or no collateral credit facilities to increase sales or connections to markets and service providers; and supporting greater access by women to e-commerce platforms to create an enabling business environment for female entrepreneurs.

The GMS Regional Investment Framework (RIF), as a centerpiece of the GMS program, will include a focus on gender equality in its prioritization of projects.

Incorporating social returns such as gender equality into the assessment of RIF projects will make the RIF a powerful tool to advance gender equality in the GMS region. For individual infrastructure projects to be included in the RIF, a gender assessment of the project and the extent to which it targets and closes gender gaps will be used to inform infrastructure investment prioritization decisions.