I can be relatively brief following that comprehensive presentation. I will give members an opportunity to ask some questions. I would like to concentrate on a brief exposé on how we got to have our national action plan, as well as say a few words on what is in the mid-term progress report and how the Department plans to implement it. I have a few statistics to indicate where the aid budget is being allocated in the area of women, peace and security.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000. It was considered ground-breaking at the time. It was the first time that the unique role played by women in conflict and the effects of conflict on women had been recognised.
It is equally fair to say that the resolution disappeared from international focus reasonably quickly. In the lead up to the tenth anniversary of the resolution in 2010, largely through pressure from civil society groups, there was increased international attention on weak implementation of the resolution up to that stage.
I am the head of the conflict resolution unit in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade which was appointed as the lead unit for developing this national action plan. It has already been mentioned that we got to the stage of launching our action plan in November 2011. The process leading up to that was quite intensive and was informed by an extensive and inclusive period of consultation with numerous civil society organisations, academics and experts in the area of women, peace and security. As Ms McManus mentioned, that group of people is also represented on the monitoring group, representatives of which are here today.
We also had a unique aspect to our national action plan as it was informed by a so-called cross-learning initiative. This cross-learning initiative brought together women from Ireland, North and South, as well as Timor-Leste and Liberia - two countries which would have been the focus of our aid programme. They got together for a series of workshops and discussions. The participants spoke freely of their experiences of conflict. A report of that process was prepared and presented to the then head of UN Women, Ms Michelle Bachelet, on the tenth anniversary of the resolution in October 2010.
The report contained an account of these encounters between women from the developed north and the developing south. It contained recommendations for how the UN system could improve engagement with women affected by conflict. Here again we see the Northern Ireland element of our experience, in that Ireland is one of the few countries in the developed north that has this experience of conflict. Indeed the unit was set up in the Department to share that experience with other countries.
This open and transparent consultative process in the NAP, which is a living document, hopes to address challenges and incorporate new lessons as we go along. We would be the first to admit that the plan is not perfect and the implementation of the plan may not be perfect, but we are in a learning process ourselves. As Ms McManus has said we are to the forefront of countries internationally when it comes to sharing our experience of developing a national plan and having it evaluated. The group, established in 2012 with Ms McManus as its independent chair, meets twice a year so there is not a very heavy burden on the members concerned. The mechanisms that are in the process of being developed - as I said, this is an ongoing process - are very open and transparent. We hope that some of the recommendations in the report on how we can do our work better can be incorporated into how we do our monitoring.
Ms McManus has already mentioned the sterling work of Ms Karen McMinn and Ms Bronagh Hinds. In addition to making this presentation to the joint committee, we have presented it to the Tánaiste and President Higgins. The very extensive process the consultants went through has delivered quite a thick mid-term report. When compared with the national action plan it is rather dense, but its recommendations are quite concise. It identified many achievements in that, given the very short timeframe it covered, much of what we said we would do in the NAP has been done. There are challenges. It has been very helpful for us to see specific examples of good practice and we hope to be able to build on those examples of good practice and perhaps add some more.
It has made many recommendations for the remaining 18-month period and we hope to implement and incorporate as many of those as possible. Most of the recommendations relate to improved co-ordination of Government activity in the area of women, peace and security, improved data collection and management, and an increased focus on women affected by conflict in Northern Ireland. On the technical evaluation and audit side, in keeping with any report commissioned by the Department, our evaluation and audit unit will be tracking our implementation of the report's recommendations.
We are a co-ordinating secretariat in that we co-ordinate the activity that takes place in our Department and also the activity that takes place in other Departments, and in the Garda Síochána and Defence Forces. We have sent out a matrix to those Departments and the Defence Forces and have also circulated it internally, asking the relevant sections to come back to us with their comments on the report. We will compile a formal management response before the end of July. While we may not be able to implement all the recommendations immediately, I hope our management response will set out clearly what we believe can be achieved in the remaining 18 months of the NAP.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade wishes to reaffirm our commitment to UN Resolution 1325 and its subsequent related resolutions. I commend the excellent work of the consultants, the monitoring and evaluation group, and its independent chair. When a civil servant is presented with somebody who is an independent person to be one's boss, the relationship can be somewhat fraught. However, this is a model that works extremely well in that Ms McManus has a well-known capacity to get things done. In the firmest and warmest way I was left in no doubt that if the timeline for the production of this report was not met, I could find myself being posted somewhere far away and would no longer be working in this area of women, peace and security. It has been a very rewarding experience to work with somebody who has such long experience. I hope that will continue.
I will cover what this means in practice for our aid budget. I will outline some figures that may be of interest. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has given core funding to the UN organisation, UN Women, of €1.5 million in 2012-13. The overall spend by Irish Aid in combatting gender-based violence in 2011 was €5.9 million. The conflict resolution unit has access to a fund within the Department, the stability fund, from which we draw down money for our activities. We estimate that funding from my unit towards women's participation projects in developing countries principally in 2011-12 was approximately €550,000. Our Anglo-Irish division also provides funding to women's groups in Northern Ireland. It provided €257,000 in 2011-12 for that work. We also have an academic grant scheme which is administered through the conflict resolution unit. We estimate that between 2010 and 2012 the total amount spent on the conflict resolution unit's Andrew Greene scholarship scheme for PhD scholars was €490,000. Beneficiaries of the scheme include Dr. Melanie Hoewer, who is present.
In 2011 Irish Aid spent €7.2 million in the category of women's equality organisations and institutions across the world. The OECD DAC, which monitors what can be counted as development expenditure has calculated that approximately 35% of all our aid funds are gender focused. Those are a few statistics to put some meat on the bones of what the national action plan means in practice.