On 6 and 7 June 2013 The Hague Academy contributed to The Regional Policy Forum on Gender Equitable Local Development (GELD) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The forum was organised by UN Women and our partner organisation UNCDF, marked the end of the pilot phase of the GELD- programme implemented in Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Sierra Leone.
The Hague Academy’s input to the panel discussion consisted of three key points, based on experiences of participants to our training courses. Our gender officer Qazal Jamali gave the forum an insight in how our broad range of participants generally look at gender issues and why and how these issues are (not) treated in their local setting.
First of all, a huge gap was observed between the knowledgeof gender equity policies on higher levels of government and the implementation of these policies on the local level.A second observation wasthe importance of gender advocacy by women and men in local government. Since men often are in decision making positions, they should be aware of the gender impact of their policies and be willing to take women’s needs into account. Finally, it was advocated that gender equitable policies are not only about increasing the number of women in local councils, but also about creating a bigger impact of women in the design and implementation of local policies.
Overall, various panelists underlined most aspect of the observations, especially on issues such as: civil servants think that change is brought only through legislation; tools such as gender-analysis at local level will increase gender responsive policies on local level; the need to translate the policy-agenda to reality and to create institutional gender sensitivity at local level.
From 3 to 14 March 2014, The Hague Academy for Local Governance organises the training course Gender Mainstreaming and Female Leadership in which the above mentioned issues will also be discussed. There are NFP-fellowships of Nuffic available and the deadline to apply for this fellowship is 1 October 2013. See: https://cms.thehagueacademy.com/blog/2013/07/gender-mainstreaming-and-female-leadership-2014/