More and more Arab countries have expressed commitment in engaging with the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) at the national level. As of July 2020, seven countries (including, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen) have developed their National Action Plans (NAPs), and more countries have announced interest in having their own NAP processes, including Egypt, and Morocco.
 
There is unquestionable agreement among WPS experts that the lack of dedicated funding and strong, transparent financing mechanisms is a key obstacle to the implementation of the WPS agenda at the national level, and of the 85 NAPs adopted to date, only 28 (33%) include an allocated budget for implementation. Moreover, advocating for sustainable financing for and solid monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of the WPS resolutions at the national level incites governments to allocate financial resources from their national budgets to finance their NAPs, on the one hand, and donor community to increase the funding and make it accessible to both governmental and non-governmental stakeholders, on the other. So, having a costed and budgeted monitoring and evaluation framework is a requirement for the effective implementation of WPS NAPs.

With the surge in designing and implementing the WPS Agenda across the Arab region in recent years, and accumulation of expertise and experience in this regard, ESCWA has been increasingly approached by the its member States to support their respective NAP processes, and more specifically to help in developing a Monitoring & Evaluation Framework and in costing/budgeting their NAPs.

In this context, ESCWA is organizing a sub-regional webinar on developing budgeted monitoring and evaluation frameworks for NAPs on WPS. The webinar, which will target representatives of national women’s machineries from the Arab countries, will held for three days between 20 and 23 July 2020.