GRAP to boost empowerment of women
By Bushra Makhdoom

ISLAMABAD—Gender Reform Action Plan (GRAP) is one of the largest projects on the portfolio of the Ministry of Women Development.
“The overall aim of this project is to promote women’s accessto the economic, political and social empowerment at the national, provincial, and district level”, an official told to newsmen here Monday.
She said that the major function of the GRAP is to develop and implement a logical gender reform agenda, to align policies structure and procedures for enabling the government to implementits national and international commitments on gender and equality issues. The major objectives of GRAP are: to help improve the statusof women, to promote processes that lead towards equalparticipation of women at all levels of governance by laying foundation for long term permanent gender equality in the society, she added. To ensure effective implementation of gender equality in relation to international conventions like Convention on Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), she added.
She said that to enhance participation of women across thegovernance sphere at the federal, provincial and district levelsall stakeholders contribute positively towards the goal of gendermainstreaming and equality. To a question she said that GRAP envisages reform in thesekey areas like political participation by women, institutional reconstructing, women employment in public sector, policybudgeting and public expenditure mechanism (Gender Responsive), related capacity building interventions.