Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact

AIPP has a gender–balance policy in all of its activities and its governance structure, and has been mainstreaming women’s issues and concerns and facilitating indigenous women’s participation. The Regional Secretariat has been consistently reminding members and partners on the need to increase the participation of indigenous women in AIPP activities. However, there are still serious constraints in achieving approximately equal number of men and women to AIPP activities. These constraints include the lack of serious efforts to identify and encourage the participation of indigenous women by indigenous peoples' organizations, limited number of indigenous women who can speak English, time limitations of indigenous women to participate in activities outside their communities, among others.

Within the various bodies of AIPP (see table 1) though, it has almost achieved gender parity. In fact, in the program committees, there is higher number of women.  However, table 2 shows that there remains a major disparity in gender representation.

Meanwhile, AIPP has succeeded in raising funds to employ a full-time Regional Coordinator for the Indigenous Women Program in September 2010. Since then, there is sustained implementation of the program to strengthen and empower indigenous women, and increase awareness on their rights. It is expected that this will further facilitate consistent implementation of AIPP’s gender policy in all of its activities.

Table 1. Gender composition in the various bodies of AIPP

Table 2. Disaggregated data of gender participation in activities implemented by AIPP and its local partners

*incomplete data of the number of trainers and facilitators in the activities implemented by local partners.

Table 2 and the accompanying chart represents the trainings, workshops/conferences/meetings organized by AIPP Secretariat and local partners at the local, national, sub-regional, regional and international levels.