This guide reviews gender mainstreaming in institutional plans, policies and programmes, and highlights key steps taken with a view to integrating gender-related issues into programmes and activities of formal institutions. The guide underlines the fact that national machineries for women must be involved in the gender mainstreaming process, since those machineries play a key role at the national level in monitoring, implementing, evaluating and following up on all issues that impact women.

Statistical data and indicators regarding the use and impact of ICT help policymakers to formulate strategies related to ICT-driven economic growth and social development. In recognition of the need for improvement of data and indicators, and to close the data gap at the international level, the global Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development was launched in 2004. ESCWA and other United Nations regional commissions have undertaken several steps to fulfil the objectives of the Partnership.

This issue considers a number of global developments related to information and communications technology (ICT) and discusses certain fundamental issues that affect the efforts of the Western Asian region to develop the information society, and the role which ESCWA plays in that domain. The central subject of the issue is e-government. In addition, there are several regular chapters on such topics of interest to the expert and layman alike as ICT policies, the activities of the ESCWA ICT Division, ICT book and website reviews as well as issues related to everyday life.

This profile aims at assessing the trade performance and structure of Kuwait since 1995 based on a wide range of indicators, including those recently calculated using highly granular, product-level merchandise trade data.