Gender Training for Women’s Networks
Oxfam-Netherlands, Somalia (Novib), Karti Newsletter, No. 4, November 2003

Novib Somalia works with three Somali women’s umbrella organisations, Nagaad, COGWO, and WAWA, together as the gender working group. Despite being outstanding women leaders and activists, members of these organisations are often not clear about gender as a concept or as an analytical tool. In response to this need, in October 2003, Novib supported a ten-day training for members of the gender working group. The workshop was facilitated by a Dutch consultant, Dorine Plantenga and co-facilitated by Maryam Qawane, former Chair of COGWO. The first half of the training specifically addressed gender as a concept and related concepts such as power, identity, change and transformation and gender in the context of conflict and peace-building were explored.

An exercise called the ‘gender tree’ was undertaken where a tree was drawn with the roots representing values, the trunk signifying institutions that spring from these values and the leaves and branches representing the outcomes of these institutions. The participants located traditional values such as the roles of men and women in the roots, in the trunk, the legal system and the family were placed and in the leaves, practices such as FGM were situated. The tree is a useful tool for demonstrating the linkages between values and institutions and practices and for highlighting gender in these.

Of particular note was the very tight linkage between values and institutions in the Somali context, such as the customary legal system; meaning change at institutional level is as hard to bring about as changing values. Although this exercise highlighted some of the challenges that face Somali women it was useful in better understanding the nature of these challenges.

The second week of the training focused on applying gender tools and analysis to the organisations represented by the women. Both COGWO and Nagaad undertook an engendered organisational analysis and developed policy guidelines to address identified gaps. The participants also reviewed the project document of the Novib ‘Strengthening Somali Civil Society’ programme from a gender perspective and made a series of recommendations to improve the project.

The training concluded with the participants identifying terms of reference and tasks for the gender working group itself, these focus on communicating and coordinating, information-sharing, advising and consulting, networking, being a ‘watchdog’, being an intermediary between the Novib programme and members/networks and long term planning and follow-up. Follow-up to the training was also identified which included a plan to meet in three months to review progress in implementing the actions agreed in the training and also stated the need for further training in management skills, communication skills and analytical skills conceptual understanding.