activist and president of the Network of NGOs Hazel Brown is
disappointed with Gender, Youth and Child Development Minister Marlene
Coudray over the National Gender Policy (NGP).
is being rewritten to include what people want to be included and leave
out what we want left out,” Brown charged adding that she was disturbed
when she attended the Ministry’s Open House, on May 17, and the
Minister declared that the NGP was in front of the Finance and General
Purposes (F&GP) committee of Cabinet and this was the furthest the
NGP has ever gone in history.
Brown spoke last Wednesday at UWI, St Augustine’s Institute for
Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) public forum on the Draft National
Policy on Gender Equality and Development.
The IGDS was responsible for drafting the 2004 National Gender
Policy (NGP), and their aim was to educate the public on the issues
surrounding the NGP.
Brown added that on July 29, 2007 the Cabinet minute 1931 declared
the document to be made into a Green Paper. She referred to an article
in the Government’s archives that said the Cabinet accepted the NGP
draft on February 8, 2010. However, this policy was found to be
inadequate, and was pulled before it could be adopted.
Brown said in 1990, the Government ratified the United Nation’s
Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and Girls
(CEDAW). This agreement bound the government to a promise to provide
equality and equity for women, and Brown said the NGP was the
Government’s way of fulfilling that commitment. But she said the
approval of the policy would go nowhere because the F&GP committee
was where “you send a policy to die.”
Brown said when she sent an email to Minister of Finance Larry Howai
to inquire about the progress of the policy, she reported Howai said
the policy was not in font of the F&GP.