This annex highlights the importance of integrating gender considerations into national waste management strategies and policies. Based on a UNEP-IETC webinar held in November 2023, it reveals how women are often central to household and informal waste management but are underrepresented in decision-making and formal employment in the sector. The document outlines common challenges—such as lack of data, funding, and awareness—and shares lessons from Bhutan, Jamaica, Nepal, and Uruguay on how to overcome these barriers. Key success factors include collecting sex-disaggregated data, ensuring inclusive stakeholder consultations, building partnerships with gender experts, and establishing gender-sensitive monitoring systems.
Gender mainstreaming refers to “the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.”