KARACHI, Feb 14: Senior planning officials including secretaries, district coordination officers and section heads of all departments are being trained under the UNDP project ‘Gender Mainstreaming’ to enable them put an equal focus on women while planning development projects.

The project is aimed at gender sensitisation of senior and mid-level officials at federal, provincial and district levels.

UNDP Project Manager Abdul Fattah Tunyo, who shares supervision of the job with Ms Naseem Bukhari of the Sindh Planning and Development Department, told Dawn that a comprehensive programme had been chalked out to train about 1,544 officials of planning and development department as well as heads of planning cells in various ministries.

The training is being conducted at the National Institute Public Administration and a Memorandum of Understanding is being signed with the Sindh Civil Services Academy at Tandojam to hold such courses. The curricula would become a permanent feature of all future trainings at the NIPA and Tandojam.

About 350 officials have already attended the course while the remaining are attending courses planned for officials of different cadres in February and March.

The training will help build the capacity of government officials to mainstream gender in identification, formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of government policies, plans, programmes, and projects in all areas of development.

One of the vital objectives of the programme is to build a gender disaggregated database having separate statistics on women folk so that their welfare could be addressed in true spirit. This would help the country to achieve a balanced planning of development projects based on gender equality as women comprise more than half of the country’s population.

The project started in January 2005 will be completed in December this year at a cost of US$680,000 funded by the UNDP.

It may be pointed out that a UNDP project is already under way to train nazims and deputy nazims in assisting women councillors in planning and budgeting development schemes for their areas.