24 BRAC Annual Report 2011
educators. BRAC’s research and evaluation division documented major achievements, for example increasing women’s freedom of public mobility from 8.2% at the baseline to 70.1% by the mid point evaluation alone. Position: This programme, launched in 2011, works with local communities to combat domestic violence and gender based discrimination in ten unions of two subdistricts covering 190,000 households. Position embodies best practices pulled from the GQAL programme. Community sensitisation on CEDAW: A pilot programme involving the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) developed user friendly information, education and communication materials and oriented 6,243 students and 200 community leaders, including media personalities, teachers, government officials and elected representatives in local government.
Gender Justice and Diversity
Organisation development Comprehensive gender audit: BRAC conducted a review of the ten year status of BRAC’s gender equality and women’s empowerment initiatives. The 2012-17 gender equality goals and enhanced sexual harassment redressal committee and investigation process are initial outcomes of this process. Board and management: This year, GJ&D held its first ever gender retreat for BRAC’s board members, and organised a gender symposium for senior management, both of which strongly complemented the organisation’s first gender equality goals and action plans. Increased capacity: GJ&D section continued to build staff capacity through gender sensitisation, gender awareness and gender analysis courses, and the staff are continuously oriented on the gender policy and sexual harassment elimination policy. Awareness of violence: More than four million community members and staff from across all BRAC programmes and departments participated in a month long campaign to raise awareness about violence against women across 500 subdistricts.
Networks and alliances Five year plan: At the invitation of the Ministry of Planning, BRAC reviewed the national sixth five-year plan through a gender lens and made specific recommendations for improving the plan, as well as for the implementation strategy. Microfinance regulation: The GJ&D team reviewed the Microfinance Regularity Authority (MRA) Act from a gender perspective. This has now been accepted as government regulation. New policies. The GJ&D team also worked actively to help the government enact the national women’s advancement policy 2011, the sexual harassment guidelines 2009, and the national education policy 2010. International solidarity: In the past year, BRAC participated in a number of national and international networks and meetings geared to building stronger solidarity around gender and human rights
issues, including the CEDAW conference in Geneva, South Asian Social Forum in Bangladesh, South Asian Human Rights Alliance, World Social Forum, South Asian Network to Address Masculinity, Programme on Women’s Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and South Asia Partnership International.
Ongoing improvement For all its considerable progress towards gender equality and diversity within the organisation and across its programmes, BRAC is acutely conscious of how much still remains to be done. In the coming years, BRAC will expand existing activities like staff gender sensitivity training and mon khula katha bola forums, and continuously improve its living tools, the policies, procedures and frameworks that help guide its gender sensitive approaches. The next year will also find BRAC working to respond to the findings of last year’s gender audit in new and creative ways, facilitating learning and best practices on gender equality issues for other BRAC programmes, integrating performance appraisal and gender frameworks more thoroughly and consistently into the project and programme management, incorporating qualitative analysis of gender in our monitoring and evaluation system, allocating an enlarged budget for gender mainstreaming and strengthening our advocacy and organisational support for the women’s movement at national and international levels. In addition to continuing to foster gender equality at the household and community levels, and combating domestic violence and sexual harassment of adolescent girls, in the coming year BRAC will also launch social communication ‘edutainment’ initiatives around the topics of sexual and reproductive health, women’s rights and violence against women.