Gender taskforce gets invited to Women's Worlds 2011
20 Sep 2011
The Women’s Worlds conference has been held every three years since 1981. This year's edition, entitled 'Connect. Converse. Inclusions, Exclusions, Seclusions: Living in a globalised world' took place in Ottawa, Canada. Two of Nuffic's gender experts working on the NICHE programme were invited to present a paper.
Conference aims
One of the key objectives of the conference is to connect participants who represent the three worlds of policy, academia and activism. The conference offers them a platform to discuss findings and solutions for developing and enhancing leadership skills of women. The conference also aims to introduce the participants to the local cultures and contemporary issues of the host country. The event attracted more than 1,700 participants from 92 countries.
Complexities of gender inclusion
Nuffic presented a paper on the complexities of gender inclusion in capacity development programmes for post-secondary education. The paper, which will be made available online later this year, describes how Nuffic mainstreams gender in NFP, NPT and NICHE. Nuffic identified a number of potential threats to effective gender mainstreaming:
- the different phases in the programme cycle;
- the ever-changing policy contexts;
- the enormous variety of stakeholders in the development and implementation of the programme;
- the different levels of analysis of integrated capacity development.
It concludes that a lot depends on conducive policy environments, individual knowledge and commitment to gender.
Conference themes
The conference was organised around three themes:
- breaking cycles
- breaking ceilings
- breaking barriers
The themes were introduced by morning plenary sessions, followed by in-focus sessions in the afternoon.
New contacts and new insights
The session on GRACE, a gender research network on ICT and empowerment, was particularly interesting, as NICHE projects may link up with the network.
The session on campus activism gave us more insights into campus activities in the US in relation to local communities. A parallel can be drawn with the African context where many students also live on campuses.
The gender analysis session was divided into three groups, which led to interesting discussions and networking between the participants.
In the session on scholarship and activism we met representatives of the gender centre in Rwanda. The centre offered to help Nuffic organise its forthcoming regional gender and labour market conference in December.
Overall, the conference provided plenty of networking opportunities and new insights into the issues and methodologies related to our programmes and projects.
