Gender - sensitive Governance
What does it look like and how can we
work towards it?
During this February I took an e-learning course;
Gender-sensitive Governance: What does it look like and how can we work towards
it? It was aimed for towards creating an enabling environment for gender
equality and women empowerment. This course was a joint effort of Institute of
Development Studies, University of Sussex and Voices for Change supported by
BRIDGE and sponsored by UKAID and finally implemented by Gender Hub.
(For certificate please click on the following link)
It was a very nice experience as the course was really
impressive and designed to impart the concept with very clear understanding. It
was designed into four modules with quizzes and audio aided description of
complex concepts with the live examples focusing particularly on Nigeria. The
main theme of this course was to open new avenues for research on Gender and
Governance by answering simple questions like how are we being governed? How
women rights and gender equality is being addressed and what are the challenges
and opportunities within the entities or organizations to achieve
democratization of governance processes? Why it is important to be part of
governance? How systematically gender equality is ignored within organizations
that ultimately impact the policies at broader umbrella? What should be done
and could be done?
By a well elaborated example of Nigeria electoral process the
systematic exclusion of women from politics was discussed and also the work of
women right activists is sabotaged to self destructive for women through
pressure groups or warlords (godfathers) having political interests. After
thorough discussion on these issues it was then bridged to social
transformation by focusing on the four principles of governance that are;
accountability, transparency, responsiveness and inclusiveness. And at the end
strategies and measures were proposed to make governance process sensitive to
gender issues; gender inclusiveness into decision making process, gender based
evaluation, gender policies developed by women and above all overall a gender
sensitive organization etc. So overall it was about conceptualizing gender
within the governance process within government channels and outside by clearly
describing the way gender issue is neglected starting from household to
societal and local to global level.
