Summary of the National Gender Equality Action Plan

A summary of Haiti's National Action Plan on equality between women and men (EFH) for 2014-2020, the first six-year plan under a gender-equality policy framed over roughly twenty years, 2014 to 2034. The policy is expressed through six orientations, eighteen strategic objectives and 139 measures, of which 52 are cross-cutting and 87 sector-specific.

The opening pages set out what the policy is for: legal equality, equal access to justice and women's personal and social rights; education in mutual respect for rights; better access for women to productive employment; female entrepreneurship; equal access to elected mandates and elective office; women in management posts in firms and senior decision-making posts in the public administration; equitable representation in political decision-making bodies; access to cultural and sporting life; prevention of and action against all forms of sexist discrimination, including degrading depictions of women; action against violence against women and girls; and better educational and vocational guidance for girls and boys, through diversified choices, alignment of initial training with employment prospects, and removal of sexist stereotypes at every level of schooling up to university.

The financing section is the most concrete part of the summary. For fiscal year 2014-2015 the Ministry for Women's Affairs and Women's Rights (MCFDF) was to have an investment budget of 155 million gourdes for new specific measures, 51 million for projects already under way and 49 million for the new interinstitutional and sectoral measures it leads, a total of 255 million gourdes. Separately, the Prime Minister's Office and other ministries were each to devote 1 percent of their investment budget to EFH programs and projects, put at 656,029,055 gourdes in total for the first year, a share the plan says may rise in later years depending on results and priorities.

The body then presents the main measures by priority sector, each with its indicators and its responsible and collaborating institutions. Orientation 1, on equal rights and equitable justice, gives the flavor of the whole: bringing MCFDF into the law-reform commission chaired by the Minister of Justice to strip discriminatory provisions from the legal framework; revising articles that harm the rights of women and girls, specifically on the conjugal domicile, the division of community property on divorce, the nationality of a child born of adultery, and the criminalization of abortion; publishing the law on domestic work; finalizing and adopting the bill on preventing, punishing and eliminating violence against women and girls; drafting and adopting bills on equality between women and men, voluntary termination of pregnancy, legal protection of childbirth, sexual and reproductive rights, and non-discrimination against women in artistic and cultural production; adopting a family code; and aligning the communications law with the principle of equality.

Later objectives carry the plan's quantified commitments, built around a quota of at least 30 percent women in decision-making functions, in the cabinet, in public services and in the police, with indicators tracking recruitment, promotion and transfer. The final measures address the machinery: giving the national body against violence toward women and girls a redefined status, introducing a gender dimension into the framing letter for preparing the budget bill, and requiring each ministry to prepare an annual EFH roadmap against the measures targeted in the plan.