Project

The Bottom-up Governance and Leadership Programme for Women in the Pacific

Grantee: Foundation for Development Cooperation

The project aimed to increase women’s political representation and increase their familiarity with governance issues and build their leadership skills. The project undertook training through an e-platform across four countries in the Pacific to achieve these goals. A subsequent “BGLP governance and leadership contest‟ was intended to promote bottom-up governance initiatives by women in their local communities. Those women who presented successful proposals went were given training in participatory project management training (PPM) and taken on a study tour before receiving funding to undertake their mini-projects.
There was a mismatch in the project between the problem identified and the solutions proposed. Differences among the participating countries were not taken into account, and the method of training delivery was inappropriate.

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Lessons from Project

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The concrete outputs of the project – the e-platform and the training modules – may be usable in future but will need to be reviewed and revised in the light of the lessons learned. This requires taking into account a solid cause/effect analysis in the country to be targeted. The materials should also be reviewed by a gender specialist to be made culturally more relevant to the projected participants. In particular, gender-sensitive approaches do not mean automatically excluding men – good gender-sensitive programming will take account of the relative status and roles of men and women, girls and boys, and aim to achieve outcomes for women that allow them to progress within family, social and cultural contexts.

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The majority of the funds were spent in Australia, on the grantee’s staff costs, on the set-up and maintenance of the e-platform, on the course and study tour. Partners did not receive sufficient resources to allow them to carry out in-country coordination and to deliver adequate support to trainees challenged by the content-heavy training materials. There was also a serious imbalance between the funds expended on the training component of the BGLP and the much more relevant and successful grassroots mini-project component.

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The majority of the participants did not have easy, affordable access to Internet. The grantee realized this early in the implementation and disseminated training materials in hard copy. Despite this, assignments had either to be submitted by e-mail or put in the post – which was costly and difficult for those living in remote areas. As a result, many of the women did not complete the course.

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The e-learning platform was not widely used or well understood. Given the limited utility of the e-platform, the grantee may want to consider diverting future funds earmarked for its maintenance to more useful purposes.

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The five funded mini-projects allowed selected women trainees use their newly acquired governance and leadership knowledge in their own communities. However the women were not given sufficiently useful tools to help them to do this since the BGLP training materials were in English and quite academic.

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