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The development of a Regional Gender Policy was one of the goals
set in this Framework to provide strategic direction to SADC and Member
States. There have since been significant and visible improvements in the
development and implementation of national gender policies, structures,
guidelines, action plans and programmes addressing gender inequities.
The SADC Protocol on Gender and Development was approved
by most SADC Member States in 2008 and entered into force in 2013.
The Protocol was updated starting in October 2015 to align it to the
Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals and Targets, the African
Union Agenda 2063, the Beijing +20 Review Report, and other global
targets and emerging issues, and was approved in 2016.
A public briefing and monitoring tool was initiated for presentation
at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, and this progress re-
port has been published at intervals since the first formal edition in 1999,
with the 7th edition launched in 2019 and the next edition planned for
2022. The data is collected from SADC Member States and collated into
a book-length publication, the SADC Gender and Development Monitor, which
is especially useful to governments, parliaments and researchers to inform
legal frameworks and raise awareness about the status of women in the
region. This is available in print and online, and a recent innovation is the
frequent updating of data through an online Gender Portal.

SADC Gender Unit 127
The SADC Secretariat took a critical step to address the issues of gender inequality more
directly, as initiated by the SADC Council of Ministers in 1996, through the creation of a
Gender Unit to facilitate, coordinate and monitor gender-related activities. The Gender
Unit was created in 1997 with the mandate to work with the national structures in SADC
Member States, called gender machineries, to facilitate a well-coordinated regional strategy
for effective gender mainstreaming, networking and exchange of good practices.
The SADC Gender Unit was tasked with facilitating, coordinating, monitoring and
evaluating the implementation of the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development, re-
gional sectoral strategies, the RISDP as well as other regional, continental and global
gender instruments that SADC Member States are party to. The Gender Unit guides the
mainstreaming of gender in all regional initiatives to ensure that a gender-sensitive per-
spective permeates the entire SADC Regional Integration Agenda. The Gender Unit’s
key result areas are Gender Equality and Development, and Gender Based Violence, and
several achievements have been reached through the institutional framework that was put
in place to drive the gender programme.

National Gender Policies and Programmes
National gender policies, structures, guidelines, action plans and programmes have been
developed to address gender inequities and raise awareness on gender equality, gender
analysis and mainstreaming.
Most Member States have undertaken comprehensive constitutional reviews of do-
mestic laws to align them with the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development, and all
SADC Member States have constitutions and statutes that outlaw discrimination on the
basis of gender. While 14 Member States are party to the SADC Protocol on Gender and
Development, only 12 Member States have signed the Agreement Amending the SADC
Protocol on Gender and Development as approved in 2016 -- Angola, Botswana, Demo-
cratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Sey-
chelles, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Although the regional protocol has been
domesticated and policies formulated, in some cases tangible results are yet to be achieved
in addressing the gaps due to limited implementation.