Internalizing gender and social inclusion requires mainstreaming

With an effort to achieve the vision of influencing the issue-based partners (IBP) towards inclusive outcomes and to support transformational change, IID, in cooperation with PROKAS, organized a three-day long residential training workshop.

The workshop, starting from 23th to 25th January 2019, on “Mainstreaming Gender & Social Inclusion” was for PROKAS’s IBP organizations. The issues that the IBPs cover are Climate Governance (CG), Fairer Labour Migration (FLM) and Food Safety (FS). The workshop was held at Gazipur, Bangladesh, with more than 20 participants from all 12 IBPs.

The workshop was facilitated by Advocate Sanaiyya Faheem Ansari, International Trainer on Feminist Legal Theory and Practice and Advocate Taufiq Al Mannan, Human Rights, Gender and Advocacy Expert. The participants shared experiences and gain new tools and strategies for responding to gender and social inclusion issues within PROKAS activities.

The first day of the workshop started with an outdoor activity on ‘Human Mapping’ and continued with role play activity on ‘Human Rights’, a framework of ‘Rights’ and the legal aspect in relation to human rights. The intention behind the sessions were to demonstrate to the participants, how we subconsciously tent to we treat people differently based on our perceived understanding of that individual.

The next day consists of, writing down stereotypical proverbs about women, another role playing on gender equality, a discussion session on understanding patriarchy, the step game and the final session of the day being the session on the concept of intersectionality.

view more photos of the event

The final and last day of the workshop was all about recap of previous days and how each partner can apply the learning in their own organization. By opening up communication between the participants from the partner organizations, this workshop aimed to ensure that women, youth, poor and excluded groups are represented in, and able to effectively participate in and benefited from the initiatives taken by PROKAS.

The main objectives of the workshop were:

  • Strengthening the capacity of participants to effectively address and mainstream gender equality and social inclusion issues within their PROKAS initiatives.
  • Ensuring that the understanding of the participants is enhanced through the training and participants can carry forward the learning and integrate principles of gender equality and social inclusion into PROKAS programme cycle.

Strengthening the capacity of the PROKAS team to understand and address gender equality and social inclusion issues in the programme and integrate into all programme, teams, processes, and systems.

Furthermore, to ensure the staffs of all the participating organizations are sensitized and aware of the complex gender-based issues, it was recommended that this workshop should be internalized by each organization. The participants were encouraged to pass on the knowledge and ideas gained from the workshop to the employee and employers at the organization.

At the very end, every participant was given a certificate for attending and successfully completing the workshop. Gerry Fox and Sanaiyya Faheem Ansari handed over the certificates to the participants.

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