By Our Reporter, Dodoma
The African Women's Development and Law (WILDAF) has conducted a capacity-building training for staff of the Climate Change Forum (Forum CC) to integrate gender issues into the organization's programs and structure.
This training is part of a broader project funded by the Sida through Save the Children aimed at strengthening organizational capacity, enhancing institutional structures, and amplifying the voices of children to discuss, advocate for, and assert their fundamental rights, particularly in the realm of climate change. The joint initiative is being implemented by WILDAF, Forum CC and other 5 consortium partners.
Speaking at the training, Forum CC Executive Director Sarah Ngoy said that the training is part of the implementation of the project, where in 2022, the organization conducted an exercise to assess its capacity in gender issues and it was found that there is a gap in the area of gender equality within the organization.
"This workshop for our staff has come at an opportune time. Last year, when we conducted an organisational Capacity Assessment, we found this gender gap within the organization. We realized that in addition to needing to build the capacity of our staff on gender issues in order to make our programs gender-responsive, we also needed systemic change, along with increasing the understanding and knowledge of gender issues for our entire team," said Sarah and added:
"This workshop has opened our eyes a lot. We still have a gap in gender issues. We need to make changes and improvements to our budgets to make them gender-responsive. Through this training, we have realized that we need to increase training for staff, allocate a budget for sanitary pads for female employees, provide a resting room for pregnant mothers when they are within our organization, and also change the financial guide to allow the payment of costs for assistants to breastfeeding women and assistants of people with disabilities," said Sarah.
She added that, after the training, the organisation will sit down and review the organisation's internal policies and guidelines, including the human resources policy, to align it with the organisation's gender policy and have a gender implementation plan for the organisation that will begin to be implemented in 2024.
The facilitator from WILDAF, Deogratius Temba, said that WILDAF is hopeful that after the training, major institutional changes will take place as the participants have made a commitment to put their efforts into institutional change so that everything that is done within the organization can be gender-responsive
