Ei-iE

Women’s participation at all levels of the teachers’ unions in the EI ACCRS region is currently low, and there is a lack of sufficiently active and supported women’s structures within those unions that can work effectively to increase women’s participation and gender equality within the unions’ structures and in relation to the unions’ policies. Consequently, recent attempts to establish a vibrant and active EI women’s network across the ACCRS have met with little success. The Gender Action Learning which is an approach to organisational change is based on experimental, peer-based learning techniques to enable organisations to change gender power dynamics both internally, and in their programmatic work. The programme is for eighteen months and aims to provide training and support to member organisations to address gender equality issues within the unions. The second step in the GAL process is for the unions to identify a change team made up of up to 6 people (with a 50/50 gender ratio), who will be responsible for developing the ‘change experiments’, that will be implemented during the programme. The change teams of both unions will receive mentoring and support from Gender at Work associates throughout the programme, as they work to implement their change experiments in the unions.

• Increase organisational understanding of women’s participation and gender equality issues;
• Increase key male union leaders’ understanding ofgender equality issues within the union;
• Further develop the capacity of the female members to participate more fully and equally within their unions.

Three peer learning workshops over the 18-month period are planned, during which the change teams will share and learn from each other’s experiences of implementing change experiments in their respective unions. The first of these peer workshops has taken place in March 2018.

Participants gained a deeper understanding of some of the gender equality issues that have arisen within their unions; they reflected on their responsibility and their role as individuals, and the role of their respective unions in addressing gender inequalities. Participants also began to identify possible actions to take, at individual, union and community levels in this regard.