A/HRC/20/25/Add.1 the Strategic Development Plan 2011-2030, but emphasizes that further active measures must be taken to enable the meaningful participation of those living in remote rural areas. Policies should include mechanisms to ensure that all barriers to participation, including linguistic, economic or geographical obstacles, are overcome. 25. The Special Rapporteur also welcomes the recent Sensus Fo Fila Fali initiative to disseminate the 2010 Census results relevant to each of the 442 sucos. This constitutes a good example of how information can be disseminated at the local level in an accessible way, enabling communities and individuals to monitor and audit progress made by Government policies in their own communities. 15 26. Importantly, the Government of Timor-Leste must also take steps to confront the growing urban-rural divide. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the Government’s commitment in principle to the decentralization process,16 and the recent scaling-up of the local development programme for the country’s 13 districts. 17 The Special Rapporteur calls on the Government to continue the process of decentralization by devolving appropriate decision-making powers to local authorities and ensuring that service delivery can be tailored to local needs and overseen by locally based officials.18 The Government should take the necessary steps to finalize and approve the subsidiary legislation for decentralization; ensure coherence between the subsidiary legislation and the national local government legislation; raise public awareness regarding the decentralization process; and enable and encourage participation in the decentralization reforms through broad civic education campaigns. The Special Rapporteur also calls on development partners and agencies to assist the Timor-Leste authorities in the process of capacity-building for its civil servants, particularly at the municipal level. V. Groups particularly vulnerable to poverty 27. Although in Timor-Leste poverty is widespread, several groups are particularly vulnerable. In the following section, the Special Rapporteur will focus on the enjoyment of human rights by two of those groups—women, and children and youth. A. Women 28. Timorese women face pervasive structural discrimination and negative gender stereotypes, which dramatically impede their ability to participate in and benefit from education, employment, health services and political representation. A life of poverty and discrimination is the reality for many women in Timor-Leste, particularly women living in mountainous and highland areas, female heads of household, widows and older women. 19 Although Timor-Leste ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 2002, and has incorporated guarantees of gender equality and non-discrimination into its Constitution, 20 men continue to be more likely to be 15 16 17 18 19 20 Timor-Leste, Ministry of Finance, Sensus Fo Fila Fali, available from www.mof.gov.tl/about-theministry/statistics-indicators/sensus-fo-fila-fali/. Strategic Development Plan, p. 119. Susanne Kuehn, ―Briefing note on the decentralization process in Timor-Leste‖ (Joint UNDP-United Nations Capital Development Fund Governance Support Programme), April 2011, second page. UNDP, Timor-Leste Human Development Report, p. 73. Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW/C/TLS/CO/1), para. 41. Constitution, sects. 17 and 50. 9