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19 August, 2009
Participants at the gender meeting held in June discussed how the gender programme could be taken forward and what activities could be put in place.
on building engagement on gender in two countries, Mozambique and Kenya. The activities would concentrate on broad based action orientated organizing of women, building bottom up gender structures and allowing learning processes to be shared.
Affiliates in these countries will receive support with the cooperation of two other affiliates, SINTIME in Mozambique would receive support from the South African affiliates and KEWU in Kenya would receive support from TUICO in Tanzania. Participants also discussed what skills and information would be necessary to be developed for the Tanzanian and South African affiliates to provide the support.
The proposed proposed process for this initial stage of the programme is:
• Leadership engagement and project structuring in terms of tactics and methods
• Establishing cooperation of the two focus unions
• Buy in of leadership of the supporting unions
• Start to draw other affiliates into efforts of support between the focus and support unions
• Develop understanding for support unions of focus unions so that they can engage correctly and on laws, structures, organizational culture.
• Develop the core group of women activists in terms of skills and capacity
• Engage at leadership and sub regional level
•Collecting organizational experiences and distributing these e.g. Good practice on general unions and women structures
• Monitoring and evaluation to move to different phases
The IMF Regional Office undertook to send a report on how affiliates will participate on the project. IMF plans to kick start implementation of activities in these two countries at the beginning of next year and at the next meeting of the IMF gender group, these activities can be reported on and evaluated.