Towards a Gender-Transformative Organisation – toolkit documents

In the WECF toolkit ‘Towards a Gender-Transformative Organisation: toolkit for an assessment of organisational gender policies and practices’, organisations are supported in their journey towards gender-transformation. It contains a participatory self-assessment in 3 stages designed to assess the organisational commitments and practices, and to what extent they integrate a gender-transformative approach. It supports the process of self-reflection about how gender-transformative approaches are realised and practised within the organisation’s own structures and networks. It provides guidelines to take affirmative action through an Organisational Gender Action Plan (OGAP) which can be implemented and measured over time.

The first stage of the self-assessment is a survey, centred around some guiding questions as set out in the toolkit. The questions should ideally be answered by a diverse group of staff from the organisation, and concern issues such as governance, programming and workplace attitudes and practices. This reporting format is one of the annexes to the toolkit, and can be used to make a written record of the answers. These answers can be consulted by a wider group of staff and form the starting point for discussions during the Team Reflection Meeting. Further, recording the answers ensures that the organisation can review and reflect on (changes to) the answers when they are updating their OGAP.

Annex 3. Reporting format toolkit.xlsx

The OGAP should provide concrete targets, strategies and (budgeted) activities to achieve gender transformation. Ideally, it can be linked to or integrated in an organisation’s annual plans or multi-annual strategic plans. The OGAP can be a written document, a simple Word or Excel file, a video or any other tool, and should be shared with all staff members. We have developed a template with some areas that we think are important to include in an OGAP – for example, organisational policies, HR/staff, and programming – but we emphasise that not all of the areas might be applicable to all organisations. We encourage organisations to think of the template only as a guideline – please adapt it to suit you. The most important thing is to ensure that it will really be a living and practical document, not one that is consigned to the archives!

Annex 4. Template Organisational Gender Action Plan.docx