What is the analysis about the main idea of the "The effectiveness of foreign aid to women's equality organizations in the MENA"? Does aid promote women's political participation?

The question this paper addresses is relevant and timely for at least two reasons. First, women in the MENA region played an important role in the Arab Spring. However, the active participation of women in the Arab Spring has not been the same across countries, quite plausibly due to differences in gender equality (Tunisia, for example, versus Libya or Yemen), and we may expect the consequences of the Arab Spring for women empowerment and gender equality to be different in different countries. Furthermore, the rise of Islamist parties that have secured de jure (and possibly also de facto) political power in some countries seems to create new concerns about the fate of gender equality. The Arab Spring and also the recent developments in the MENA region may cause foreign donors to rethink their aid allocation strategies. Harrigan (2011) who assesses the aid allocation process to North Africa in the past few decades, argues that the fact that past aid flows to the region have been strongly influenced by donor political interests 'has reduced the effectiveness of aid which, with the exception of Tunisia, has not been associated with sustained economic growth'. Furthermore the author suggests that the Arab Spring could provide an opportunity to reappraise aid flows to North Africa, and argues that 'future flows need to support the democratization process, generate pro-poor growth, support social safety nets and address the pressing issues of widening inequalities and unemployment'. The empirical results obtained in this paper suggest that ODA to women's equality organizations and institutions (ODA_WEO) is in general effective. The independent effect of ODA_WEO is between 0.015 and 0.02, suggesting that a US$200 increase in ODA (per 1,000 people; or US$0.20 per capita, per year) to women's equality organizations and 15 institutions increases the proportion of shares held by women by about 3 points. We find that autocracy has a significant negative influence on women's political empowerment in the MENA countries, suggesting that autocratic regimes in general do not provide an institutional environment that would support women's political empowerment. We also find a robust negative effect from adolescent fertility. The evidence on the effects of female secondary school enrolments is less robust. We discuss the main policy implications of the empirical results in the next paragraphs. First, women's equality organizations and institutions, which have grown remarkably in the post-Cold War era, have received large amounts of foreign aid in recent years. For example, total aid commitments to WEOI in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia was about US$11.5 million in 2010, up from US$3.83 million in 2000, and reached a high US$71.33 million in 2011 (while the gross disbursements were about US$13.9 million on 2011). Indeed, women's equality organizations and institutions are using higher amounts of aid and are expected to continue to do so for the next few decades. It is, thus, important to assess the effectiveness of this type of foreign aid. Given that there seems to be empirical evidence (albeit preliminary) of the effectiveness of ODA to women's equality organizations and institutions in promoting women's political empowerment, there appears to be a case for increasing the allocation of this type of official development assistance. In addition, we argue that evidence of effectiveness may also be used to convince private donors to increasingly target women's equality organizations and institutions, especially at community and non-governmental levels. Second, to the extent that women have significant political participationa critical mass in national parliamentswe may expect a stronger push for gender equality. In this case, foreign aid to women's equality organizations and institutions could play a crucial role in enhancing women's role in shaping policies and laws in their countries. Indeed, the question of 'critical mass' is extremely important since only with much higher levels of parliamentary participation than currently exist in most MENA countries would women be able to affect major policies and laws. A critical mass for female parliamentary participation is also very important in post-conflict (post-revolution) parliaments (as has been observed in the case of Rwanda). It has been argued that women's contribution to world peace and economic and social progress could be significantly enhanced if their share in top political and policy and decisionmaking positions is high (Fukuyama 1998; Hunt 2007). A number of studies have argued that women differ from men in their political and policy preferences (Edlund and Pande 2002; Edlund, Haider and Pande 2003; Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004); Miller 2008; Beaman et al. 2010) and that 'increased female representation in politics is associated with significant changes in policy-making' (Franceschet, Krook and Piscopo 2009). Such changes in policy-making could be more significant the higher the proportion of women in national parliaments. In turn, changes in laws and policies that lead to more support for women's rights can enhance women's political empowerment by enabling more women to participate in politics. Foreign aid to women's equality organizations and institutions could play a catalytic role in this process; for example by funding women political leadership training programmes. In addition, previous studies have demonstrated that women in national parliaments can make a significant impact on health and education (Miller 2008; Chen 2010). Thus, an increase in the size of women's parliamentary representation may contribute to the effectiveness of foreign aid targeting health (including family planning) and education by including these sectors in the country's list of priority areas. 16 Third, the evidence on the positive influence of ODA to women's equality organizations and institutions is good news. On the other hand, given that this type of ODA is a very small proportion of total aid support to gender equality (see Table A2), one would hope that other types of aid programmes that may significantly affect women's wellbeing, such as aid targeting family planning and reproductive health would also contribute to promoting women's political empowerment. However, we find that neither ODA to family planning nor ODA to reproductive health has a positive impact on the share of seats held by women in national parliaments. Given that several studies have noted the ineffectiveness of aid to family planning to significantly reduce fertility rates in many countries (Pritchett 1994; Dalgaard and Hansen 2010) it is worth investigating whether foreign aid to family planning would be more effective if instead aid amounts are allocated directly to women's equality organizations and institutions with the view to promote women's political empowerment and higher parliamentary (lower house) representation, since a critical mass of female parliamentarians would support policies favouring a reduction in fertility rates and policies that tackle issues of importance to women (as noted in the previous paragraph). Finally, and perhaps more importantly, in order to understand how the positive effects of ODA to women's equality organizations and institutions on women's political empowerment work, future research should examine the channels through which ODA_WEO is distributed and its various uses. Given the available data (and the macro-focus of this paper), this seems to be very difficult if not impossible to undertake at the macro level. In particular, it would be extremely helpful to identify what are the activities financed (fully or partially) with aid to women's equality organizations and institutions. How do they actually promote equality? Do they also focus on political empowerment and how? Surveys and micro-level studies of disaggregated foreign aid use should help shed light on these issues. Indeed, there is a major challenge for donors, as argued by Nanivazo and Scott (2012), "to ensure that gender is, and remains, a development priority in an era of 'priority overload' in development policy, and globalization...The danger is that gender equality will be subsumed into wider discussions about inequality reduction in order to reduce priority overload, so negating the importance of gender'. Further investigating the effects of aid to women's equality organizations and institutions on women's political empowerment may provide useful insights for donors on how to address the challenge.