 ACM is a method that's been used for a long time using participatory action research methods, but there actually hadn't been developed a manual on how to really put ACM into practice. So when we started our project and we're trying to figure out exactly what this ACM was, which we'd heard so much about, we ended up having to go to various people and look for information from other places to figure out how to pull it together to train our own facilitators for their field work. And so what we ended up doing is using ACM with a gender approach and through the project we realized that we ought to be putting together a manual that would allow people who were interested in ACM to get an introduction to how to do it with some really straightforward forward graphics and descriptions of and experiences from the past that included a lot of work that's out there but hasn't really been put together in an ACM manual but then also to include the gender focus. So it's not about looking at gender as a problem in a community because ACM approaches problem-solving around natural resource management, but it integrates the gender focus into the problem-solving itself. So every step of the way you're looking at how to integrate women, how to involve women, you're observing, monitoring, and promoting discussion and feedback around the participation of women while you're working on the other the solving the principal problem that the community has decided to focus on. This manual emerged from a project called Gender, Tenure, and Community Forest in Uganda in Nicaragua funded by the Austrian Development Agency. We started using ACM because it seemed like a really good way to approach community problems in using an approach that's as non-intrusive as possible where you go into a community and really focus on facilitating processes within that community to talk about problem-solving but at the same time we're bringing in by bringing in the gender focus we have to take an approach that's very sensitive and very that allows the community to take up the issues in the way that is a safe for women and appropriate in those communities. So ACM was a way to start talking about women's participation in projects ensuring that women were invited to the meetings to develop the discussions around the problems in the community and again provide safe places for those kinds of discussions to take place. In both countries we found that the legal frameworks were really good for women and promoted women's participation in Nicaragua they have legal framework that's excellent in all elected offices there have to be 50% women but when we got down to the community level and working in indigenous communities in this case we found that the actual participation was much more behind the scenes so decision-making in public spaces was still very male-dominated and in many communities actually what we found in Nicaragua is that it wasn't even men versus women it was really a small elite within communities that were making decisions were deciding who would come to meetings and who would participate so the issues around gender were really embedded in bigger governance problems in community so the ACM process by facilitating spaces where these issues could be brought up and discussed openly helped has helped the community start figuring out how to address some of these problems it's difficult and challenging especially again I'm focusing on Nicaragua because that's the part of the project that I coordinated but we're working in indigenous communities where traditional authority is very important and going into the community through traditional through the authorities is very important so then trying to encourage those same authorities to be more open to open up governance to be more inclusive can be very sensitive issue and it takes a lot of deep knowledge of the of the region and the communities themselves in order to be able to do this which is why it's so important to work through local partners and not come in as an external North American coming in and saying you guys need to work on gender that's not what this is about and so this is the kind of method ACM is the kind of method that allows something like this to happen