Making impact through Gender Transformative Approaches: an online training in support of trainers on addressing critical gender norms

FAO's Regional Office for Africa (RAF) gender unit and 14 trainees joined hands virtually in a 6 sessions long online training event. The training event was to prepare them for organising a national training for the beneficiaries and stakeholders of the NORAD project, on ''Empowering Women in fisheries for Sustainable Food Systems''. The objective of this training was to build the capacity of trainers to enable them to organise trainings at the national level. Specifically, the sessions were designed to help master the theory and tools on gender sensitive value chain analysis, gender transformative processes, key issues in women economic empowerment and ultimately build a strong network at national level between project staff and RAF.

A screen shot of all the attendees of the Gender Transformation training Event held over Zoom ©FAO

Gender focal points from the FAO representations of Ghana, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda were trained and they will in turn provide technical support to the project and the national workshop with key value chain stakeholders. The gender unit of RAF has adopted a gender pathway approach for the NORAD project and will provide more trainings for the trainers as the process progresses.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic this training had to be organised online and for the RAF trainers this brought a real challenge to translate gender transformation into a hands-on regional training.

The training process started with gender sensitive value chain analysis, gender analysis in post-harvest loss analysis and tools for understanding gender issues in a value chain upgrading process. Each session was concluded with a practical assignment. The first assignment made use of research R4life and invited participants to use as much as possible the lessons learned and research available on their fisheries. The practical assignment focused on different functions in fisheries, women and men and on the power relations and perceptions actors have on how the value chain functions and how changes should make a contribution to both value addition and household well-being or protection of the natural resource, base of all sustainable livelihoods.

Research articles from Ghana, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda on fishers, fish unloaders and processors, middlemen, retailers and climate change concerns with a gender lens were shared and provided a broad scope of knowledge and data on the sector.

The Code of Conduct for Sustainable Fisheries and the SSF Guidelines were used during the training with reference to their role in sustainable value chains and gender equality. Both instruments were seen as instrumental for bringing about institutional change.

The value chain and post-harvest gender-based constraint analysis documents how men and women in the fisheries sector operate in distinct and sometimes complementary actions highly influenced by the social, cultural and economic contexts. Economic status, power relationships and access to valuable resources and services influence the capabilities and perceptions. These different factors need to be understood and guide in a gender responsive manner address value chain upgrading and reduction of post-harvest losses.

Compared to men, women also face more technology related problems, business expansion finance, and transportation. Their situation is compounded at the level of the market, where they face price fluctuations for their goods, or where social and/or cultural factors restrict their business prospects that are close to home. Although women may enter local markets, they may still be unable to reach the national or global markets dominated by men. Sometimes they take responsibility for the basic livelihood needs of their families, which often dramatically depletes their working capital.

A number of the gender-based constraints limiting women's active participation in the value chain included unpaid work and time burden, lesser skills, exposure to training and quality and decent jobs, less participation in leadership and collective action, limited access to property, asset and finance.

To ensure that women and men both benefit from their activities in the fisheries sector, the gender transformative approach is recommended as it goes beyond gender integration in programmes and project to tackle the underlying causes of gendered inequalities (norms, attitudes, behaviours) and generate effective changes. Changing the unequal gender power dynamic, the formal and informal social structures and relations that reinforce gender inequalities and increase women's decision making role so that both women and men would have the ability to make their own choices and act upon them, increase their knowledge and skills improve their access to information.

Examples of Gender transformative processes were provided in the domain of combating illicit undeclared and unreported fisheries and in the domain of combating HIV/AIDS in fishing communities as well as awareness raising on sex-for-fish.

In the Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods programme the work of Augusto Boal was applied and research on perceptions, knowledge, attitudes and practices was together with volunteers from the fisheries communities translated in a community theatre play. The theatre play was performed in all the coastal communities and for decision makers of the region and at national level. A Joker facilitator is used to mobilise, raise awareness and get communities engaged in change. Boal often organized these theatrical systems as a tree, with images and words as the roots. As the process of identifying gender-based constraints in value chains analyses causes and factors leading to the inequalities Boal's theatre methodology could be a tool to mobilise fishing communities to engage in the change process.

The process of gender transformation needs the active dialogue of men, women and youth with support from FAO and the DIMITRA approach. The facilitation and the use of community or local radio to ensure that all stakeholders are informed and feel part of the process are some of the strengths of the DIMITRA approach that were presented to the participants.

The last session of the training introduced indicators of tracking the gender transformative process. Participants were invited to continue to share their preparations of the national training with the RAF gender team, the Rome based team of technicians in PHL and fisheries.