Our interventions are directed towards vulnerable and marginalized communities (e.g. young people, women, poor). All our operations acknowledge and mainstream intersectionality in its gender analysis. Intersectionality refers to how different social stratifiers such as sex, age, education, geographical location, ability, etc. interact to create different experience of privilege or vulnerability for different groups of people. For instance, our urban agriculture initiative supported poor urban dwellers in developing allotment gardens to increase their food security, especially that of women and children, while providing a safe place for women to gain some extra income. In our analyses, we extensively review how the context creates gender power relations that can affect different groups of people, including if and how existing policies and programmes address or perpetuate these relations. Most of our activities mainstream gender and/or social inclusion of marginalized groups using four guiding principles: (i) use a gender lens, (ii) define the beneficiaries and successes, (iii) support what is ongoing and showcase these, and (iv) dare to include targeted, affirmative action.
Concretely, the first guiding principle clearly asks: Is it a man or a woman. This question allows clarifying whether our intervention will be beneficial for both women and men and other vulnerable groups because women and men’s roles in society differ along with their interests, needs and the challenges they face. The second guiding principle starts at the beginning by defining our beneficiaries and selection criteria to ensure the activities ate based on specific pro-gender criteria. The third guiding principle is realistic and focuses on what’s already happening and showcases these. Through this principle, we recognize the limitation of projects to generate rapid gender equality change. Therefore, in our activities, we try to identify (relative) successful stories, cases and practices on gender equality and define means to showcase and achieve these. Last but least, the fourth guiding principle dares to be bold by involving additional and targeted affirmative actions to address persistent gender gaps and promote gender equality. Therefore, our activities focus on specific interventions targeting women and vulnerable groups and leading to gender transformation.
Furthermore, our research activities constantly provide gender and inclusion analysis. Concretely, research activities examine, analyse, and build an evidence base to inform long-term practical changes in structural power relations and norms, roles and inequalities that define the differentiated experiences of people. For that, our research goes beyond the analysis of differentiated roles, experiences, and perception gaps and explore the underlying structural causes, norms, and power relations that caused gender differences to provide evidence based solutions that contribute to gender equality.
