Gender Maldives Producer Organisation

Capacity Building for Women’s Leadership in Farmer Producer Organizations in Asia and the Pacific Region

The strategy of this grant is to improve the enabling environment surrounding projects by working with men and women to build awareness of rights and leadership amongst farmers, staff of agricultural support organizations, and local government. The enabling environment was developed by developing the capacity of IFAD supported project staff in three countries to roll out trainings in gender-integrated planning for producer groups in their projects. WOCAN organized five capacity development workshops for 16 IFAD project staff and selected members of their national counterpart organizations, and provided on-site support for them to roll out trainings to producer groups in Lao PDR, Maldives and Sri Lanka.

The project identified some key challenges that limit a fuller achievement of the project goal to create an enabling environment: firstly, IFAD project staff who were trained in gender-integrated planning along with producer groups were largely unable to influence changes in the project orientation in the immediate term. It was evidenced in this project that changes and improvements in IFAD projects are subject to recommendations from mid-term reviews that delayed the opportunities presented by best practices that emerged from training inputs.

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