Gender at Work

Did you know that Gender at Work is a transnational community of practitioners comprising 37 Associates across 16 countries and a compact, diverse administrative and programmatic core team spread across three regions? 🛠 Using transformative approaches and innovative tools, we support partners to increase inclusion and equality within organisations and communities by challenging entrenched norms. Committed to #feminist principles, we support leaders and activists whose aim is to disrupt patriarchy, racism, classism and heteronormativity, and transform ways of being and doing in their places of work. Here's what we have been up to for the past three years 👇

👩🏿💻 Introducing our new blog series: "Keeping the Light On: Reflections on Gender Equality and Inclusion (GEI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Africa" 👨🏾💻 AI holds great promise for addressing complex issues faced by organisations, from healthcare to agriculture. However, the journey to fair and equitable #AI implementation, especially in research, is fraught with challenges and risks. Without care, algorithms and datasets risk perpetuating the same inequalities and prejudices that social justice organisations have been working so hard to eradicate for years. In this new series, participants from Artificial Intelligence for Development Africa (AI4D Africa | IAPD Afrique) share their reflections on integrating Gender Equality and Inclusion in their research. Their stories highlight innovative, user-centred approaches to AI which enable the most marginalised to improve their own lives. Join us over the coming weeks as we explore how openness, questioning biases, and experimentation can lead to AI innovations and policies that truly benefit everyone in a community. Link to the introductory blog post in the comments 👇🏽 🤝 International Development Research Centre (IDRC) - Sida - Ladysmith - Women At The Table

A fantastic guide for rethinking monitoring, evaluation and learning through a feminist lens. The document outlines the key principles of feminist MEL and how to apply them in practice: 💥 Participation & power sharing 💥 Intersectionality 💥 Collective learning 💥 Care & wellbeing 💥 Facilitating role 💥 Celebrate diversity And explores key systems-level challenges to using this approach and how we might work together to address them, including: 👉 recognising that results-based management is extractive and passes the burden onto partners 👉 MEL should be embedded into the social change process rather than an add-on 👉 Changing the framing of rigour and what counts as knowledge 👉 Recognising that mutual trust and accountability is an essential part of partnership building and institutional strengthening The document captures learning from a session on MEL in October 2023. Contributors include: Rosette Nanyonjo from Count Me In! (CMI!) a consortium of feminist funders and organisations based in the Global South and North. Rana Khoury and Jenny Sonesson from The Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation Rom Romalwati and Fitria Villa Sahara from PEKKA Foundation Kaushi Kogar and Alma Magana from JASS (Just Associates) Carol Miller and Ghada Jiha from Gender at Work Lori C. from Power Up! Consortium Noura Shahed and Kim Groen from Save the Children International Lila Aizenberg from Leading from the South Jaynie V. from Oxfam Novib Frédérique Been from Partos Great piece of collective learning 👏 👏👏 #feministMEL #evaluation

📢 The AI4D Gender Knowledge Synthesis Webinar on #HumanRights and #AI with Dr. Angella Ndaka Ph.D., Mitchel Ondili & Dr. Ojenge Winston, PhD is now available for viewing! A thought-provoking conversation, centering the #MaputoProtocol at the heart of possible avenues to free tech from bias and discrimination. Check-out the webinar & the AI4D Series: https://lnkd.in/dR9bkdNi #FeministAI AI4D Africa | IAPD Afrique Gender at Work Africa Centre for Technology Studies International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Women At The Table #InclusiveAlgorithms #MaputoProtocolAI #GenderInformedTechnology African Union

In 2023, feminist consortia united to call for an immediate ceasefire and the protection of the Palestinian people. Sadly, our joint statement remains as valid and urgent today as it was seven months ago. As part of #PowerUp!, a consortium of womxn’s rights organisations whose goal is to actively support womxn-led collectives, movements, and organisations in their efforts to challenge and dismantle oppressive structures of power, we reiterate our call for the recognition of Palestinian lives as human lives equally deserving of protection and worthy of dignity, security, peace, justice, and liberation! ✊🏿 ✊🏾 ✊🏽 Read the full statement here: https://lnkd.in/eMX5HfU9

For the past two decades, Gender at Work has been challenging and transforming the unwritten rules and exclusionary practices that perpetuate inequalities within organisations and communities across the world. Learn more about what we do & how we do it 👇 https://lnkd.in/dZm_cz2Z

Everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, deserves love, respect, and freedom, and should have access to fundamental rights afforded to all human beings. On this International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT), we call for the rights and lives of LGBTQIA people to be respected and we stand in solidarity with organisations, networks, collectives, and LGBTQIA human rights defenders who challenge social and gender norms and disrupt sites of political, economic, and institutional exclusion of LGBTQIA bodies, voices and resources. While there are more countries today that have strengthened legal frameworks safeguarding LGBTQIA rights since #IDAHOBIT was first commemorated two decades ago, these advances have not come easily, nor are they guaranteed. We are still very far from a world that is fully equal, safe, and inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and other gender non-conforming people. Structural and social stigma and discrimination continue to fuel violence against LGBTQIA people and to exclude them from access to vital services, resources and opportunities. Moreover, LGBTQIA people are confronting significant rolling back of their rights and hard-won gains in many parts of the world. In some countries, they face torture, imprisonment and death. On this #IDAHOBIT, we seize the occasion to: ✊🏾 express our solidarity and admiration for our #PowerUp! partners who are bravely advancing LGBTQIA rights and claiming spaces for LBQTI women’s autonomy, equality, and resilience across Africa and Asia in the face of volatile political contexts and continuous threats to their existence. 📢 amplify a message of hope and a call to action: each and everyone of us can find a way to challenge harmful stereotypes, contribute to dismantling systems of inequality and injustice, and hold power to account. We can all help to create a present and a future where love knows no boundaries, and where every individual can thrive. It is up to us to build societies that celebrate diversity and uphold universal human rights and the principles of equality and freedom for all!    #IDAHOBIT2024 #May17 #EqualityForAll  

💡 Feminist economic realities focus on pathways that are people-centred, holistic, rights-based, and grounded in values and justice. These realities encompass dimensions of care, pleasure, and general life management, and are not driven by values that solely prioritise economic growth, capitalist accumulation, and empowerment models that lead to economic individualism. At #CSW68, Count Me In! (CMI!)’s event "Imagining and Building Inclusive Feminist Economies" highlighted four examples of such feminist economic realities in action, encouraging funders and INGOs to rethink the concepts of economic empowerment, intersectionality, and equality. Among the speakers, Romlawati from PEKKA Foundation, our partner in the #PowerUp! consortium along with JASS (Just Associates), shared insights and challenges from decades of experience of cooperativism with the poorest women-headed families across 27 provinces of Indonesia. Read more about it here 👉 https://lnkd.in/eKzbpMGq

🗣 To change systems of power that uphold inequality in place, relationships between people, institutions, and organisations also need to shift. With support from Oak Foundation, Gender at Work collaborated with Civil Society Academy grassroots and community-based organisations to enhance leadership capacity within social change movements and foster collaboration through a feminist and human rights-centred approach in Jharkhand, India. 🎬 https://lnkd.in/dKr9hgF9

🧠 "When it comes to ‘best practices’, whose practices do we tend to default to? Do we risk perpetuating norms about whose information matters more when we develop how-to guides and checklists? Can tools and resources then ever truly be part of a longer term, feminist approach?" Read Shannon Sutton's reflections about feminist principles and the role of tools and resources in the context of the work with International Development Research Centre (IDRC): https://lnkd.in/dz_J9iPf 🌱 You can learn more about the long-standing partnership between Gender at Work and IDRC here: https://lnkd.in/d3xqeUE4