The crisis presented an opportunity for promoting and institutionalizing gender equality, which the program has successfully harnessed.The program featured strong gender equality actions that helped significantly to promote gender empowerment and ensure its formalization in the government’s policy agenda. These actions include improving the policy, legal, and institutional environment for gender equality, supporting women’s entrepreneurship and access to finance, and strengthening protection from gender-based violence during the pandemic. The latter action, in particular, warrants more attention. The program was able to leverage government support for the introduction of a national hotline and website for self-registration within vulnerable groups, including for victims of domestic violence, to obtain social protection. This was particularly important given a rise in domestic violence cases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, the program included 23 gender-related outcome indicators. All of these were successfully achieved.
Promoting Economic Diversification Program (Subprograms 1, 2 and 3)