Integrating Gender Mainstreaming into Policies and Programmes

Course Outline

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals offer a historic opportunity to eradicate extreme poverty and create a more peaceful and prosperous world for all. To realise this opportunity and achieve SDG5: Gender Equality, governments must act to address gender inequality and ensure that women and girls and people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) are not left behind.

Public servants must do more to ensure government policies, programmes, and services are responsive to these groups’ specific and diverse needs. They must also work harder to identify and address the underlying discriminatory laws, policies, norms, and practices that prevent women and people with diverse SOGIESC from fully participating in and benefitting from all aspects of political, economic and social life. Without this focus on gender equality and equity, public servants risk deepening existing inequalities that hinder the realisation of human rights and hold nations back from achieving their full potential.

Increasingly, national governments that demonstrate a commitment to gender equality are more likely to secure support from the increasing number of bilateral and multilateral donors that make women and girls' human rights a cornerstone of their approach to development cooperation. Public servants demonstrating skills and competencies in gender mainstreaming may also benefit from accelerated professional development.

Who is this course for?

This course is for public servants and others engaged in policy-making and programme delivery who want to learn how to integrate an intersectional gender perspective into the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of their policies, programmes, and services. This is to help ensure they are responsive to the specific and diverse needs of women and girls and people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions and sex characteristics.

Course Objectives: 

On completion, you will be able to:

• Ensure you use non-discriminatory language, make gender visible when relevant for communication purposes and invisible when not relevant
• Conduct an intersectional gender analysis to inform the design of your policies, programmes, and/or services
• Integrate gender considerations into the monitoring, evaluating and learning of your policies, programmes, and services
• Forge mutually beneficial and equitable partnerships with civil society organisations, including women-led organisations, movements and groups
• Safeguard against gender discrimination in the workplace and the delivery of policies, programmes and services