Steps

Following introductions and a review of the exercise, the facilitator asks two people to take notes as the group discussed a few general topics:

• In what ways are gender and sexuality being currently implemented in your programs and within the organization?
• Who are the key stakeholders who play an important role in integrating gender and sexuality, and what are their expectations and/or concerns?
• What are the current mechanisms within the organization that have an explicit learning purpose? What kinds of new knowledge are generated? Who contributes to generating and who benefits from new knowledge? How is learning being documented, shared, and applied?
• What are the enabling factors (helping forces) or barriers (restraining forces) related to the program integration of gender and sexuality?
• If you could redesign or adapt your project to more effectively integrate gender and sexuality issues, what would you do and why?
• Following the discussion, the group discusses next steps to be taken to integrate gender and sexuality more effectively into current projects and programs.

 

Variation

Once participants gain a firm understanding of the definition of women’s empowerment, the facilitator asks the group to reflect on women’s empowerment in their work. As an introduction, participants reflect on:

• What are some harms, problems or challenges linked to promoting women’s empowerment in our work? (ideas may include threatening men, deteriorating relationships between men and women, gender roles stay the same, etc.)

Based on these discussions, the facilitator introduces the concept of gender mainstreaming, and the need to ensure that gender issues and the different needs/interests of both women and men are integrated into program and policy design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation across institutions.
The facilitator then asks participants to form groups according to their teams (by partner organization or project teams). Groups discuss:

• How does your project or organization currently consider gender and equity issues across your activities?
• How is this different or the same from practices within your organization in the past?
• Looking at the future, what can your project team or organization strengthen its commitment to gender equity and women’s empowerment across its activities?

Following group work, each team presents where they see gender equity strengths and weaknesses in their activities in the past and present, as well as areas for strengthening and further action in the future.

The facilitator concludes the exercise by discussing the importance of understanding how our organizational structures and activities may interact with gender dynamics in communities and within our own teams, and the critical role gender analysis places in helping us to understand gender in the communities where we work.