Kampala — I thank you for your warm welcome and in turn I extend a warm welcome to this, the eighth Commonwealth women's affairs ministers meeting since the first in Nairobi 22 years ago. The message then was the message now, and it is the message of that excellent film which we have just seen.

It's this: 'Women count'. Count them up and you reach three billion- half the people on this planet. Dis-count them and you reach the state we are in, where half of the people on this planet bear considerably more than half of its problems.

There is no limit to the amount of times we should repeat the bare facts-that two-thirds of those below the poverty line worldwide, who cannot read and write, whose children do not go to school are women.

Meanwhile half a million women die every year in pregnancy or childbirth and the face of HIV/Aids is that of a young African woman.

Women are still dying of discrimination both in our Commonwealth and beyond. No one should let this happen and least of all you.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the context in which we meet today.

Imagine women who are HIV-positive, widowed, with an unemployed husband, a long way from water, with children sick or out of school. Then ask yourselves: "What does a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper or an 'aid modality' mean to them?

What do they know about WTO negotiations, trade agreements, the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) when it comes to anti-retroviral Aids drugs?

And what would they make of our meeting here in Kampala this week?

How do we ensure that so many women such as these benefit from the kind of development and democratic gains that we seek to promote?

There cannot be development or democracy without women. Gender equality is a recognised marker for progress in societies. So how much of that progress are we making?

What became of the fanfare of the Cairo Consensus of 1994 and the Beijing Platform for Action of a year later?

The only way we can measure our progress on the status of women is to see where we stand on the two (out of the eight) Millennium Development Goals (MDG) which relate specifically to women - promoting gender equality, empowering them and reducing maternal mortality. The remaining six directly affect women especially goal 6 on HIV/Aids.

Remember that within each Goal there are targets and each target has indicators, which are quantifiable.

Under MDG 3, gender gaps in primary and secondary education were supposed to be eliminated by 2005 and not less than 90 countries worldwide missed the target. South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are way off track.

Under MDG 5, it is universally recognised that most maternal deaths are preventable and two-thirds of them happen in the Commonwealth.

Somehow we are massively failing women because of a policy, human rights and money issue.

As our topic 'Financing Gender Equality' stands, on paper, things look healthy. Aid commitments and debt relief have been scaled up since 2005, while the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness focuses on improving aid processes and quality. But has the aid been forthcoming?

Last week's G8 Summit in German showed that it has not. The 0.7% ODA target is still a long way off.

When the world revisits the Paris Declaration of Aid effectiveness in Accra, next September, it will find an increasing evidence that 'women are being missed' by development aid, because first, the money is not in the pot.

A 2006 research paper commissioned by the World Bank estimates a shortfall of no less than $30b for the year, in funds needed to meet the third MDG for gender equality. That figure rises to about $70b by 2015.

Secondly, there are funding constraints, conditionalities over aid and complicated new aid modalities. Our Commonwealth task is not to allow women to be 'missed'. That is why we now ask Commonwealth finance ministers to report annually on the way their budgets are constructed for the benefit of women, and of course girls. While overall progress is slow, change is taking place especially in countries where finance ministries are leading -Tanzania, India, Pakistan and Uganda. That is why we have to lobby everyone who will be in Accra.

Our united voice must say that, for real development effectiveness, gender has to be at its heart. And that is no pipe dream. It is measurable reality and one of the results of Accra must be an agreed set of indicators to show that this is being done.

I say this with confidence, because there is a science to financing gender equality, and I am proud to say that it was pioneered by the Commonwealth.

We were ground-breaking in the field of what we call Gender Responsive National Budgets, which in the confines of this meeting I think I am allowed to call GRNBs.

In fact it was women's affairs ministers who launched the whole concept at 5 WAMM in Trinidad in 1996.

GNRBs have now been adopted by 30 Commonwealth countries and 30 more beyond.

The budgets are to qualify and quantify the impacts of different elements of national expenditure and reallocate resources where necessary to benefit both men and women.

We have seen this happening in places like Tanzania, where a series of gender-discriminatory laws have been reviewed and India, where there are what we call 'gender budget cells' in no less than 50 government ministries.

All the tools are ready and our challenge is to mobilise them. We understand the concept and scope of women's equality and our Commonwealth Plan of Action for Gender Equality 2005-2015 was and is one of the most far-sighted, flexible and comprehensive frameworks of its time. I would suggest that it bears more scrutiny than the documents which came out of Cairo and Beijing.

The Commonwealth and its member countries have already done the policy work to ensure that gender is recognised as a component of all government policy, from health to education, to business and to political representation. They have already produced the training manuals and capacity-building programmes to turn policy into practice. They have done important work on behalf of women to influence trade policy and negotiations, while at the same time trying to link poor women workers to global markets.

So far all is fair and it comes back to money, and to Nelson Mandela's advice: "When the water starts boiling, it is foolish to turn off the heat". I know that Commonwealth heads of government will say the same when they meet in Kampala in November. Keep women's rights and gender equality on the front burner. There is compelling evidence that if we do not, we risk doing a serious disservice to future generations.