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The MedProgramme Gender Community of Practice: gender-responsive environmental action in the Mediterranean

The MedProgramme/UNEP/GEF

By IW:LEARN

February 24^th, 2023

The MedProgramme Gender Mainstreaming Strategy is a key pillar of the programme, ensuring gender equality objectives are also met as part of MedProgramme activities. For that reason, the MedProgramme Gender Community of Practice (Gender CoP) was established in June 2021 as a forum for executing partners and national counterparts to enhance knowledge on gender equality and women’s empowerment in sustainable environment development within the context of MedProgramme activities. This is where all key MedProgramme actors meet regularly and exchange experiences, views, and ideas on how to effectively integrate gender considerations in their work. This is an open space for discussion where they unleash creative thinking, ask questions about gender mainstreaming modalities, and tease out complex issues, reduce learning gaps, share good practice examples and lessons learned, and enable shared understandings and consensus-building.

Prior to the launch of the MedProgramme Gender CoP in June 2021, members were invited to fill in the ‘Rapid Gender Capacity Assessment’ survey in order to establish a baseline on partners’ capacity on gender mainstreaming. Based on the findings, during the first Gender CoP meeting, most partners indicated they have no or very limited experience in implementing gender mainstreaming activities, some have acted in the past as gender focal points, so there is a clear need to have a solid gender training amongst partners. This pointed to a clear need for unbundling the “how-to” and facilitating a deeper understanding of participants’ perspectives with regards to gender activities. Partners also mentioned that, so far, efforts were being made for equal representation of women and men in meetings, fora, and project activities. However, it wasn’t clear to them how they can go beyond this and had questions about how gender can be translated into action. Participants made clear that they would greatly value Med PCU’s support on how to translate gender rhetoric into gender actions in the context of Child Project activities.

Two thematic Gender CoP meetings have been so far, while more are planned for 2023:

a) The meeting held June 2022, focused on gender issues in biodiversity. A brief presentation on the topic was delivered, whilst experience from mainstreaming gender in the EU- funded IMAP-MPA project were shared, including on how to identify gender entry points for marine and coastal protected areas projects. A database of Gender & Environment Online courses that are useful for Gender CoP members was also presented, as useful tools for members’ capacity-building. Involvement of youth was also highlighted as a key consideration in the context of the MedProgramme. SPA/RAC, for instance, will be organizing a scientific camp in Tunisia targeting youth, where they aim to have 50/50 representation between men and women. Finally, gender milestones at the programme-level were also discussed, as a compass for follow-up action. At the end of the session, members mentioned that, following the presentation on gender mainstreaming in the context of the IMAP-MPA project they have a much better understanding of how gender can be translated into action.

b) The meeting held in October 2022, focused on gender issues in chemicals and waste. Extensive information was presented on why it is important to look at this topic (POPs and mercury particularly), given women and men’s different exposure to harmful chemicals and associated impacts (due to biological differences, social gender roles and gender-specific division of labour in occupational roles). An update on the implementation of gender activities in the context of CP 1.1 was provided, mainly on gender capacity-building activities at the national level (Algeria), knowledge exchange with relevant actors (SAICM Community of Practice, BRS Secretariat, WECF, IPEN and others). Case study examples were presented from PlanetGOLD, ISLANDS, as well as WECF case studies from Indonesia and Nigeria on how gender has been integrated in project activities. Members shared updates on progress and highlighted the need to strive for more concrete results on how the MedProgramme reduces gender gaps and benefits women in partner countries, by sharing success stories and good practice examples.