Gender Capacity Enhancement Programme Over the course of 2016-2020, the Advocacy for Change programme allowed Solidaridad to enter on a joint journey with experts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other partners, and to develop a comprehensive gender mainstreaming strategy within our organization. This also allowed us to develop strong thought leadership on gender inclusivity. We have translated lessons learned by re-examining our analytical approach on gender and social inclusion to intersectionality and intersectional gender analysis. This helps in understanding the multiple identities that farmers, miners, and workers have that reinforce their marginalization, and in some cases oppression. It is through the intersectionality lens that youth as a concentrated majority excluded group is currently a target group in our (SME) support interventions.

In the past years, our RECs have enhanced their ability to consistently integrate, implement, evaluate and learn from the gender strategies in their plans. We have developed gender training materials that support internal capacity enhancement and project implementation, which include an internal knowledge platform, the Gender Buckets, the Gender ABC and Gender Business case. The three tiers of the gender business case are based on the following notions: 1. Making optimal use of available human capital and opportunities by supporting women to climb the socio-economic ladder leads to enhanced economic growth 2. Balancing so-called male and female perspectives and approaches enhances the quality of decision making 3. Investing in gender inclusivity provides a valuable long-term return on investment for future generations.

A learning trajectory has been started to generate evidence for the business case for gender inclusivity in households, communities, businesses, and governments. A global team of regional Gender Experts is now in place, working towards decentralized capacity enhancement at REC level. We have developed a full 4-moduled curated gender inclusivity course. This course has been made digitally available on the Kaya platform for both internal staff and project partners during the Covid-19 pandemic. All the materials and tools developed by the task force have been tested and validated through pilots in various RECs before disseminating them to the network and external partners.