In order to effectively mainstream gender equality and women’s empowerment in UNODC’s work across the country, the UNODC Mexico Office (COMEX) created a special group to advise personnel on gender and human rights matters. This group was established with a dual purpose. Firstly, it aims to train and sensitize personnel on the relevance of mainstreaming gender and human rights in their programmatic work and to support the development of specialized projects on gender-based violence (GBV) and gender and justice matters. Secondly, it aims at sensitizing managers on HR policies which promote work-life balance and the processes and initiatives forming part of enabling working environment, including analysis of gender parity, wage gaps and steps to empower women in the workplace.
“Back to the Community”, a project that delivered vocational training to prisoners and which benefitted directly from consultations with the Gender and Human Rights Advisory Group, provides an example of how the support of the Advocacy has been enhancing the impact of the work of the UNODC Mexico Office. Martha Orozco, Project Coordinator, explains that the support she got from the group led her to conduct an analysis of the specific needs, interests and capacity of female prisoners, with the Advisory Group supporting the development of workshops corresponding to their needs. Thus, the project broke stereotypes, such as seeing entrepreneurship as male domain and only teaching beauty and cooking-related jobs to women. It instead provided workshops that were of interest to women. Additionally, through the consultations with the Advisory Group, training schedules were accommodated to the needs of women living in prison with their children, allowing them to attend preschool activities.
Luis Marvin Andrade, advisor of the Criminal Justice and Crime Prevention Program in COMEX, explains how incorporating the gender and human rights perspectives in the management cycle of projects allowed the Mexico Office to generate evidence of the impact of these interventions. It empowered not only UNODC but its partners too, to design evidence-based interventions which promote gender equality and human rights. At the same time, Luis adds, “the Gender and Human Rights Advocacy Group has created a perceptible awareness of the importance of promoting gender and human rights perspectives. This, besides adding value to project proposals or implementation, has also changed our institutional culture. That has a knock–on effect on our implementing partners´, despite criminal justice institutions and the military being particularly complicated environments to promote intersectional gender equality and inclusion.”
The Gender and Human Rights Advisory Group has played an active role in creating an enabling working environment by launching an initiative aiming to support female personnel with young children and promoting flexible working arrangements. The Group also produces periodic statistical reports on gender parity in terms of salary, which has led to more women project coordinators and heads of programmes. On the programmatic side, the Group has been supporting the drafting and negotiating of new project proposals that provide new working opportunities for female staff, such as the Spotlight Initiative with a national project that trained over 15,000 police officials to detect and investigate violence against women and girls, and feminicide. Finally, the Advisory Group by and large drafted the UNODC Mexico’s Gender Equality and Women Empowerment Action Plan (2024-2026) based on UNODC’s institutional Strategy and Action Plan. Possibly the first amongst the UN agencies in Mexico.