HAVANA, Cuba (CMC) — An agreement geared towards strengthening institutional architecture for advancing gender equality in the region was one of the outcomes of the just concluded 56th Meeting of the Presiding Officers of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, held in Cuba.

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) on Saturday said delegates also agreed to “consolidate the dialogue and regional cooperation”.

The conference, organized by ECLAC and the government of Cuba, through the Federation of Cuban Women – was attended by international officials and representatives of civil society, as well asparticipants celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Regional Conference on Women, which is one of ECLAC’s nine subsidiary bodies.

In addition to thanking delegates, ECLAC executive secretary, Alicia Bárcena, highlighted the approval in 2016 of the Montevideo Strategy for Implementation of the Regional Gender Agenda within the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Framework by 2030.

She described the framework as “the roadmap that identifies the critical cruxes of gender inequality and provides concrete policy guidance.”

Bárcena said that, at a difficult time for global multilateralism, “we tell the region and the world that it makes sense to forge collective spaces for addressing these challenges together, men and women.

“There are countries that have gender equality plans, but a further step must be taken: incorporating them into national development plans and budgets,” she said.

Mariella Mazzotti, Director of the National Women’s Institute (INMUJERES) of Uruguay, meanwhile, noted that “the Regional Conference on Women represents an area of joint work, where step by step countries are constructing an idea of the kind of democracy and the type of social relations that we want.

“Countries cannot build that gender democracy, that parity democracy that we all want, in isolation,” she warned.

Ileana Núñez, Cuba’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment, lauded the Regional Conference’s four decades of uninterrupted work.

“Since the first conference was held in Havana (in 1977), this has been the main forum for following up on the action plan and negotiating a regional gender agenda,” she said, thanking “the high attendance to this meeting, especially at a time when many of our countries have been affected by natural disasters and are in the process of recovering.”

ECLAC said officials presented a repository of legislation on migration and gender prepared by ECLAC’s Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean, in conjunction with the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The repository includes 94 national legislative regulations from 21 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Venezuela.

ECLAC said the laws contemplated contain explicit references to migrant women, adolescents or girls; prohibit all forms of discrimination based on gender and on migration status; and insist on the need to respect the specificities of gender and migration status.

Delegates agreed that economic, productive and fiscal policy at the service of equality will be one of the main topics at ECLAC’s next Regional Conference on Women, which will take place in 2019 in Santiago, Chile.