Red tape delays empowerment fund

Red tape delays empowerment fund

Red tape and cronyism are partly responsible for preventing the 7.7-billion-baht Women's Empowerment Fund (WEF) from being able to improving women’s development, critics say.

Since the fund was launched last February, about 130 million baht has been allocated to each of 20 heavily-populated provinces, 100 million baht each to 22 medium provinces, and 70 million baht each to the 35 smallest provinces, according to the WEF website.

It took two years between Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand’s first female prime minister, delivering the WEF policy to parliament in August 2011 and its launch.

Women rights advocates have said the fund has made little progress in terms of improving women’s capacity and promoting women’s roles.

The critical comments about the fund, which is designed to support Thai women, came as the country celebrated International Women’s Day yesterday. They said the fund had many problems, such as unduly close connections between politicians and state authorities in charge of the fund and members of the WEF committees at national and local levels. These close connections lead to fears of conflict of interest, the critics said.

Amporn Boonthan, chair of the Tambon Huay Sai WEF committee in Chiang Mai province, said the fund management and project approval procedures remained cumbersome, prone to nepotism and irrelevant to the real problems of communities.

Instead of linking civil society works and existing women’s groups, funds have been allocated to people with links to politicians and civil servants, Ms Amporn said.

She urged women’s groups to make more effort to get access to the fund.

“We need to work out how to reach out, design and support the real needs of the women on the ground so that the benefit will not be lopsided to certain political groups,” said Ms Amporn.

Papeemoh Poh-itada-oh of the Women For Peace Association said the fund had not yet been properly implemented and evaluated.

The fund should be expanded to the neediest groups of women, not empower those who already have a chance and access to human and capital resources, Ms Papeemoh said.

Sriyada Palimaphan, secretary to caretaker Social Development and Human Security Minister Pavena Hongsakula, said relevant agencies had begun evaluating the fund's implementation. She pleaded for solidarity from women’s groups as she admitted red tape and legal constraints had hampered projects.

Meanwhile, caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra called on the public to help promote gender equality in her message to mark International Women’s Day yesterday. The message, posted on Ms Yingluck’s Facebook page, said Thai women still needed the opportunity to develop themselves.

Do you like the content of this article?
COMMENT (2)