High Level Meeting to Present the Gap Assessment Tool for Mainstreaming Social Justice in Public Policies

ESCWA organized a virtual High-Level Meeting on 22 December 2020 to launch and present a newly developed tool that aims at assessing the extent to which social justice principles are mainstreamed throughout public policies.
 
ESCWA developed this tool to assess the strengths and weaknesses in the extent to which public policies take into consideration the principles and concepts of social justice. The tool aims to support Arab countries in identifying existing gaps and opportunities in policies considered to be a priority in terms of their responsiveness to the principles of social justice. Based on this evaluation, the tool will ultimately result in proposing the main interventions and reforms needed to bridge these gaps and adjust policy formulation processes by adopting practical and concrete steps to address them. This tool reviews the main social justice principles and topics available in a user friendly, interactive, and accessible format, and includes a set of relevant and practical standards and indicators.
 
Twenty-six government officials, experts and policy makers representing the Ministries of Social Affairs and the Ministries of Labour in ESCWA member countries participated in the High-Level Meeting. The workshop concluded with a set of recommendations that focused on: 1) Despite the compatibility of many policies with the principles and concepts of social justice, practical solutions must be found to fill existing gaps in the application and implementation of public policies. (2) Institutionalize issues, principles and concepts of social justice within ministries and their administrative units, and entrenching and perpetuating a culture of social justice at the national level; (3) Provision of technical support from ESCWA to build the capacities of policy makers and experts in sectoral ministries and government agencies to mainstream social justice issues when formulating national plans and policies and when developing indicators for measurement and evaluation; (4) Agreeing to  apply the PGAT in evaluating wage policies, minimum wage policies and worker protection policies in ESCWA member states.