Kathmandu, March 4:

With a view to institutionalising gender equality in the civil service and addressing women’s issues in the government policies, the Ministry of General Administration (MoGA) has prepared a draft on gender-mainstreaming strategy.

MoGA spokesperson Suresh Man Shrestha said the gender-mainstreaming strategy aims to bring in more participation of women in the civil service, enhance their effectiveness, create gender-friendly environment at the workplace and address gender issues in all the governemnt policies.

The draft is a component of the Governance Reform Programme (GRP) that makes ministries obligatory to implement gender-mainstreaming programmes.

The GRP, which was formulated in 2005, is at the stage of implementation.

The policy aims to achieve parallel gender development and make the number of men and women proportional at every level of administrative mechanism as per its objectives.

The draft has come up with four objectives: Create gender sensitive environment, enhance women’s participation in civil service, increase women’s participation in decision making level, implement policy and make monitoring and evaluation effective.

The strategies to be adopted to achieve the objectives are: Reduce incidents of sexual harassment, management of gender sensitive complaints, create gender friendly work environment among others.