15.4 Review of Peer Practice As the most established regional organisation of NHRIs, the APF has little directly applicable peer practice to draw upon from the other regional coordinating committees in Africa, the Americas and Europe and nor at the international level with the ICC. At the national level many NHRIs do not have an explicit gender policy, focusing instead on gender campaigns. However, the wider community of development international development agencies have been pursuing formal gender mainstreaming programs for some time, demonstrating pockets of success. Some donor agencies also provide guidance on what they regard as best practice in gender mainstreaming. The APF review of peer practice focused on identifying well-established gender mainstreaming mechanisms that, if implemented together, would constitute model practice for the APF in delivering gender equality outcomes. The following organisations have been identified as providing practical examples of best practice: • • • • United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Gender Equality Strategy; Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) gender equality frameworks; International Labour Organisation (ILO) Participatory Gender Audit; and World Health Organisation (WHO) Directing Council Resolution. In reviewing the above four organisations approach to gender mainstreaming it is clear that the primary objective behind gender mainstreaming is designing and implementing projects, programmes and policies that: • • • Do not reinforce existing gender inequalities between women and men; Attempt to redress existing gender inequalities between women and men; and Attempt to redefine gender, women and men‘s gender roles and relations.3 The degree of integration of gender in any given project, programme or policy can be conceptualized as a continuum, as show in figure 1 below. The APF’s history of advancing women‘s rights, reproductive rights and protecting and promoting gender diversity indicate that the APF is substantially progressed along this continuum. These programs recognise gender as central to fully achieving positive capacity outcomes for APF members. While many of its activities are demonstrably gender positive, there remains scope to evolve this commitment fully, firstly by transparently ensuring that this objective is being pursued across all APF activities and secondly by seeking opportunities to advance APF practices to a point where they are consistently gender transformative. 3 Annotated Bibliography on Gender Mainstreaming and Analysis Resources for Health Programmers, Pan-American Health Organization Gender and Health Unit, 2003