Promising Practices

Inclusive & Accountable Institutions

These approaches promote effective institutions that are inclusive of and accountable to diverse peoples across genders and other identities. This work supports community, community, market and state agencies and actors to integrate gender equality and justice in their leadership, formal rules and institutional practice, and services. This involves working directly with government and community decision-makers, service providers and the private sector, building more inclusive and resilient community governance, and support to social accountability and other processes that bring power-holders and different groups together – centering those most impacted by exclusion and marginalization – to discuss rights and services.

Social and Workplace Accountability

These approaches help citizens engage systematically with power-holders of different kinds – including service providers, government and the private sector– to increase dialogue, transparency and accountability. These approaches often focus on improving services for poor and marginalized people, including citizen oversight and other social accountability activities (i.e. public audits, citizen charters and community scorecards).

In this section you will find:

  • CARE: Social and Economic Transformation of the Ultra-Poor (SETU, Bangladesh)
  • CARE: Community health monitors (Peru)
  • CARE: Community Score Card (CSC, multi-country)
  • CARE: Community Support System (CmSS, Bangladesh)
  • CARE: The Abdiboru Project (Ethiopia)
  • CARE: Enhancing Women’s Voices to Stop Sexual Harassment (STOP, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam)

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Human Rights Education for Political Change

Women for Women: Human Rights Education Program (Istanbul, Turkey)

The Human Rights Education Program (HREP) for Women, a project of Women for Women’s Human Rights and the Umraniye Women’s Center,  took part in poor urban areas of Turkey with its first pilot in Umraniye, a poor area on the outskirts of Istanbul. Heavily informed by action research with women across Turkey, the program developed a participatory curriculum that lasts 16 sessions. HREP used a human rights framework to facilitate sessions, touching on civil, economic, political, sexual and reproductive rights, as well as topics like child rights, ending gender-based violence and gender-sensitive parenting. HREP worked with closed groups of women and eventually linked with the state to implement the program via trained social workers who facilitated HREP in community centers in cities across the country. Through this space, women involved In the project organized at the grassroots level to advance their needs and interests, and HREP took an active role to support HREP cohorts in networking, fundraising, capacity-building and linking with broader movements for women’s rights.[1]

In this section you will find:

  • What the evidence indicates from the Human Rights Education Program (HREP)
  • Brazilian NGOs: Mulher e Democracia (Brazil)

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Gender Integrated Adaptation and Resilience

As natural disasters and climate change affect people in distinct ways based on their status, gender and livelihoods, it is critical to ensure equity remains at the center of decision making, participation, access to resources and services and interventions.

In this section you will find:

  • CARE: CARE’s Adaptation Learning Programme (ALP, multi-country)
  • CARE: Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR, Vanuatu)

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Connecting marginalized groups to services and safe spaces

UNHCR: LGBTI Protection strategy (Multi-country)

Since 2014, UNHCR worked with Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration (ORAM) to develop a LGBTI protection strategy to promote more inclusive and safe spaces for LGBTQI refugees across five field and camp offices in Jordan. This involved trainings with UNHCR staff on rights, risks and needs of LGBTQI refugees. LGBTQI advocates and community members also offered advisement to UNHCR services to shape resources, activities and services tailored to support LGBTQI refugees. As a result, UNHCR and its partners undertook activities to: 1) train UNHCR and partner staff on the rights and needs of LGBTQI people in forced displacement; 2) establishment of a referral system and network of staff trained to work with LGBTQI people and issues of protection; 3) Integration of LGBTI rights across services, propaganda/outreach and assessment of the needs of people in forced displacement. Members of the network of staff trained to support LGBTQI refugees also wore rainbow pins with the phase “you are safe here” to make themselves identifiable. The initiative also conducted trainings to support working with LGBTQI Persons in Forced Displacement with 24 organizations and 435 humanitarian staff. [1]

In this section you will find:

  • What the evidence indicates from UNHCR: LGBTI Protection strategy
  • International Rescue Committee (IRC): Mobile/roaming teams (Lebanon)
  • ABAAD: Al-Dar Emergency Midway House (Lebanon)
  • Poorani Women’s Shelter: Poorani Women’s home (Northern Sri Lanka)

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