The Greater Mekong Subregion Gender Strategy Implementation Plan 2025-2030


Key Messages

 

What

The Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Economic Cooperation Program aims to broaden the gains of its interventions across three key pillars: community, connectivity, and competitiveness. In line with the GMS Strategic Framework 2030 (GMS-2030), the GMS Program seeks to ensure equal access and participation in opportunities arising from regional cooperation activities through the GMS Gender Strategy.

To operationalize the GMS Gender Strategy, the GMS secretariat—together with the GMS national secretariats and gender focal persons and with the support of the ADB Gender Equality Division—developed a Gender Strategy Implementation Plan (GSIP). The GSIP provides the specific activities, performance indicators, and systems or mechanisms to develop the capacity of the GMS Program to achieve the following objectives of the GMS Gender Strategy:

  1. Improve existing methods and develop new and innovative approaches to gender mainstreaming to ensure equal access, participation, and treatment in opportunities arising from the GMS Program,
  2. Complement subregional efforts to explicitly address gender barriers affecting the full participation of individuals of all ages and abilities in all socio-economic spheres, and
  3. Address pervasive gender norms that disadvantage one group over another.

 

Why

In 2021, an assessment of gender issues in the GMS revealed that while all member countries have adopted country-specific strategies to advance gender equality and have improved or maintained their rankings in the Gender Inequality Index of the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Reports, common challenges persist that prevent individuals from fully benefiting from regional economic opportunities as follows:

  1. Social norms that assign individuals to specific gender roles,
  2. Gender gap in participation and attainment in education, including in vocational training,
  3. Gender segregation in the formal and informal economy (labor market and enterprises),
  4. Unequal access to healthcare, and
  5. High rates of gender-based violence.

 

These findings suggest that women have not benefited equally from the regional development achievements and efforts and, thus, the subregion has not yet benefited from the full and equal participation of women from all social and economic spheres.

 

How

To strengthen the capacity of the GMS Program to move toward achieving the objectives of the GMS Gender Strategy, the GSIP includes the following key activities:

  1. Establishing the management systems for delivering the GSIP, which includes forming a GMS Task Force on Gender composed of two representatives from each GMS country and tasked to ensure the delivery of the GSIP in line with national gender policies and strategies.
  2. Mainstreaming gender equality into the GMS Program’s main areas of operations, particularly the eight sectors under its three pillars (i.e., community, connectivity, and competitiveness) and single- and multi-country projects under the GMS Regional Investment Framework (RIF). A guidance note will be developed for mainstreaming gender in RIF projects.
  3. Positioning the GMS Program as an emerging knowledge resource (through the GMS Program portal) on sectoral approaches to addressing the gender barriers affecting the ability of women and men of all ages and abilities in all socio-economic spheres to participate and benefit from GMS regional cooperation initiatives.
  4.  Developing innovative measures to address pervasive gender inequality norms by piloting a project for women’s empowerment in a nontraditional sector and conducting triennial forums on emerging gender-related issues and initiatives.

 

Based on the GMS countries’ national gender equality policies and framework, the emphasis of actions for mainstreaming gender equality and inclusion will range from a specific focus on women’s and girls’ empowerment to the recognition of intersectionality as an analytical framework to capture multiple dimensions of discrimination and vulnerability, such as age, disability, ethnicity, and income status. Work in this area will also cover expanded definitions of gender discrimination that encompass women, men, and people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth.

Finally, GSIP will define gender performance indicators at three levels—impacts, sector and subsector outcomes and outputs, and institutional effectiveness—which will be integrated into the GMS-2030 Results Framework.