Within each of UNDP’s five practices, UNDP Barbados and the OECS advocates for the protection of human rights and especially the empowerment of women. Through regional and global networks, UNDP Barbados and the OECS shares ways to promote gender equality as an essential dimension of ensuring political participation and accountability; economic empowerment and effective development planning; crisis prevention and conflict resolution; access to clean water, sanitation and energy services; the best use of new technologies for development purposes; and society-wide mobilization against HIV/AIDS.

The following are the regional and subregional programmes designed to support these corporate and regional specific goals:
•    The multi-donor initiative to support Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) and Social Data Collection.
•    Support for economic and financial management under the CARTAC project. The CARTAC initiative supports the capacity development needs of countries by providing support to new and emerging economic sectors, which include offshore and financial services. The package of cutting-edge advisory and training services, which will be delivered by the project, will ensure that the countries in the Region are equipped to meet new global fiduciary standards and can participate efficiently in the rapidly changing global and financial environments. CARTAC is IMF-executed and UNDP Barbados and the OECS provides administrative support to the project. The design of the project has resulted in strengthened collaboration and partnerships forged between CARICOM, the IMF, CIDA and UNDP. Other agencies such as IDB, IBRD, DFID, USAID and the European Union have funding support agreements to enhance the provision of technical assistance and training services in these critical areas of economic and financial management. This comprehensive level of support has resulted in the pooling of donor resources contributing to the US$13.6 million three-year budget of the project. It is a model of donor cooperation which should be replicated to mobilize adequate levels of resources required to address other development needs of the Region.
•    Under a UNDP Subregional Project, UNDP funded technical inputs to support the establishment of a Human and Social Development Unit in the OECS Secretariat and to facilitate the coordination and analysis of social statistics. The Unit created systems and programmes to assess currently available social data and identify areas where data necessary for social planning are required on an ongoing basis.  It designed and implemented a system for the collection of new classifications of data, including a permanent household survey capability which was established and upgraded in the national statistical offices of Member States. The formulation and publication of an OECS Human Development Report was one of the main outputs of this project, which received funding support of around US$600,000.
•    UNDP in collaboration with CIDA provided US$1.5 million to improve the capacity of microfinance institutions in selected OECS Member States. The project will also strengthen the sustainable delivery of financial services to low-income entrepreneurs by enhancing the institutional and technical capacity of the subregional and national level organizations.  The UN Foundation funding also facilitated this MicroEnterprise Development Programme to improve access to finance and related non-financial microenterprise and entrepreneurial development support for vulnerable population groups in the Eastern Caribbean. It is designed to complement multi-donor inputs from the Eastern Caribbean Donor Group to the micro-finance sector as well as UN System Poverty Eradication Programme support.
•    These main areas of assistance are complemented by smaller support projects to provide enhanced capacity and in-house training for national staff in OECS Member States as well as other departments involved in IT, governance, community-based and poverty eradication initiatives.  UNDP core resources amounting to approximately US$300,000 funded these capacity building initiatives.
 

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