 Hello everyone, my name is Philippe Insatz. I'm a research associate with the International Institute for Environment and Development. I've been with the Institute for seven years working in the legal tools team where I lead the team's work on gender and land. I'm a law and development specialist. My work focuses on social legal empowerment of women, particularly in the context of natural resources governance. Today, together with my colleagues, Emily Beauchamp and Anna Bolin, we are going to talk about some recent research work that we have been doing on the factors that enable local women's voices to be heard in decision making processes in public and private governance. Hi, my name is Emily Beauchamp and I'm a senior researcher in the monitoring, evaluation and learning team at RID. Most of my work and expertise is focusing on being the technical lead in research and evaluation methods at the Institute, especially in terms of building evidence for climate adaptation interventions. But I also work cross group with all my colleagues. My previous ID, I was working in academia at the University of Oxford, focusing on climate resilience of small older farmers and the profits. Hi there, my name is Anna Bolin and I'm a senior researcher at IIDs forest team within the National Resources Group. My area of work is with forest and farm producer organizations, as well as small holder and medium forest enterprises. I work a lot with community forestry as well as farmers growing trees on their farm and trying to help them see how they can benefit the most from those activities. Prior to joining IID, I was working within an NGO who focused on policy for forestry globally, so I was focusing on the red mechanism. Some of you may know it, it's reduction from emissions from forest degradation of forest deforestation. So that's a little bit about me and a pleasure to be with you here today. I wanted to start this presentation today with this quote by our director Andrew Norton, which I think nicely sums up IID's work and really highlight voices and decision making our call to what IID does. In fact, although IID's research groups focus on specific and diverse issues such as the governance of natural resources, climate change, sustainable market. All our projects are actually characterized by a similar approach because we really work bottom up to amplify marginalized voices. So why did we decide to focus on local women's voices in public and private governance? Why does it matter? Women make half of the world's population. They should be able to actively participate and express preferences and views everywhere decisions are made. Women's voices in private, economic and public life should be a quick component for gender equality and women's empowerment. In fact, women's participation in decision making processes is a target under SDG5. It was also the focus of the last session of the Commission on the Status of Women. In our work at the community level, we have however noticed that local women's voices are consistently underrepresented in governance bodies and processes. This relates to public governance, such as in the case of local councils and committees making decisions on the use of natural resources, for instance, but also private governance bodies, like in the case of producer organizations and cooperatives. Our work shows that decision making processes in sectors such as land, climate change, conservation and forest entrepreneurship are consistently dominated by men and that women's needs and interests are rarely taken into account. Of course, there are projects and programs which focus on women's participation, but there remain an exception. We believe that local women's participation should be much more integrated systematically into programming. But how? How to do that? Active and effective participation is complex. It requires multiple factors. There is also for now limited evidence of what works to ensure that women's voices are really heard in decision making processes across fields. We have therefore decided to review some of our work from various sectors to better identify the factors that enable or constrain local women to participate in governance. We are hoping that this will pave the way for a more integrated approach to women's participation in governance. So to that effect, we have selected three case studies from different areas of our work, which all at some level focus on women's participation in public or private governance. One is from our land governance work in Tanzania, the second from our decentralized climate finance work in Senegal, and the last one from our forest and farm producer organizations work in Ghana. So I'll start by presenting the Tanzania case study, and then my colleague Emily and Anna will take over and present their work from Senegal and Ghana. So let's start with the Tanzania case study, which focuses on land. In Tanzania, as in many other parts of Africa, land is a pressured resource. It is affected by many factors and one of them is large-scale land-based investment. When land is given away or taken by an investor, community can be negatively impacted and often women are more affected by men. This is due to a variety of reasons, but one of them is the fact that women are not involved in decision-making on land, on which piece of land is given away. And this is despite the fact that Tanzania actually has a progressive legal framework on women's participation in land governance. The national framework provides for a minimum number of women to be members of local decision-making bodies, making decisions on land. However, this legal framework is poorly implemented and more often than not, women members do not attend meetings for a variety of reasons. Our partner Tawla, the Tanzania Women Lawyers Association, has actually developed an approach to strengthen local women's participation in decision-making processes on land by, how they call it, bringing the law home. This is done through the adoption of gender-sensitive village bylaws. Village bylaws are subsidiary rules which are enacted locally and regulate local life, including the use of natural resources and social and cultural relations, for instance. And the idea of Tawla was to include in these bylaws provisions on women's participation in decision-making processes. The rationale behind this approach is that when adopting their own rules, villagers will know them and implement them better. The approach for adopting such bylaws is participatory. It is based on extensive community dialogue and the promotion of local ownership. Since 2016, Tawla has actually implemented the approach in six districts across four regions in Tanzania. And a recent study in some of the villages where the bylaws were adopted shows that women have been more present and vocal during meetings and also that they had an increased knowledge of their land rights. So what have we learned from this process? Well, we've learned that quotas and legislation on women's participation are not enough per se, but they are an important starting point. They do provide a legal ground for supporting approaches to strengthen women's voices. In our case, this really allowed Tawla to replicate the approach in an important number of villages and districts across the countries. We've also learned that local rules are an effective tool to ensure that national legislation is implemented locally and in particular the one on women's participation. Then from a more process perspective, we've learned that having community in the driving seat is incredibly important. In our case, they were co-leading the process which really contributed to local ownership of the process, which is key to sustainability. And we've learned that collaboration with local authorities is also essential. Tawla actually worked closely with district and village authorities everywhere they've been working. And finally, we've also learned that local rules that provide community-wide benefits contribute to local ownership. The fact that the bylaws were not only including rules on women's participation, but other kind of rules. Really, rules which were benefiting other community members was really part of their success. Thanks, Silipin, for presenting the experiences from Tanzania. I'm now going to share reflections from the Devolve Climate Finance, or DCF, mechanism piloted in Senegal. In a nutshell, DCF is an approach to adaptation, planning and financing that puts communities at the heart of decisions for investing in local climate resilient projects or infrastructures. So a core component of the approach is engagement and involvement of communities. To date, the DCF mechanism has been piloted in Kenya, Tanzania, Mali and Senegal. But today, we're going to look at lessons from Senegal more specifically, based on a pilot that took place from 2015 to 2019 through the DFID-funded program, building resilience and adaptation to climate extremes and disasters, or braced. The DCF approach works by devolving decision-making for investment and adaptation at the lower levels possible and directly including communities in the process. That means that inclusion of different social groups is critical to make sure the investments will truly respond to the needs of the most vulnerable, including women and girls. Now, I need to stress that DCF, unlike the two other projects in this presentation, considers women participation as critical and on unequal steps as other social groups. So we rather use a gender lens, but this project wasn't targeted only specifically to women. That said, gender positive actions were implemented at different key stages of the process. For example, there were specific steps for engaging and consulting with women and women's groups separately when involving communities at the beginning of the project. Also, quotas were used to ensure a 50% representation of women in local and communal decision-making committees. What this means is that there were different stages where women's priorities specifically were channeled, integrated and prioritized. This was reflected through decisions on the types of investments. For example, one village's decision to invest in building toilets for girls to be able to attend school. But it was also reflected in the location and the design of the investments. This is especially the case for water investments, for which women got more involved and more will coincide where the wells, pumps and trough should be truly based to respond to their needs. Or for example, how to design a trough so that whole households and animals could use it safely. However, we also know that women's participation did vary a lot between villages and women's priorities were sometimes absent from investment decisions. A clear factor explaining not only how many, but how actively women were participating was education and skills. This could be formal education, but also skills from working at a market, counting, writing and negotiating with people. So women who had experiences from being recognized in their professional lives were the ones who were primarily taking the stage. But even with education and skills, we saw that participation really occurred at intersecting identities. And by that I mean that there were no villages where all educated women or skilled women participated or none. In fermented views, we find that despite a woman's education and confidence to speak, if her husband or family doesn't support it, then she likely won't. That said, the opposite is also true. But that, of course, that's not a really new finding. What we really learned from this experience was that sporadic engagement, even if it's done in a structured way in IQ stages, is simply not enough to make sure that planning decisions reflect women's priorities for climate investments or any other issues. And our very clear next steps for the DCF projects is to redress this gap and give women much more space and time to engage with the process. In our final case study, we'll return to Ghana. Here, a federation of forest and farm producer organizations is strengthening women's individual and collective agency through enterprise. This is part of IID's work with the Forest and Farm Facility, which is a partnership between the FAO, IID, IUCN and Agricord. CIDA is the main donor of this 10-country program and just over 60% of program funding goes directly to producer organizations in the former partner grants. Although gender equality is not a main focus, it is mainstream throughout and nearly 50% of in-country budgets now go directly to either women's organizations or gender-related activities. The Ghana federation of forest and farm producers, or GAFAP, is a mixed-gender organization that have carefully built a structure to ensure women's voices and interests are heard and acted upon from the grassroots to the national level. So how does this work in practice? GAFAP has set up a set of working groups at the national level and across the three ecological zones of Ghana where its members are based. These are the forests, the transition and the savannah zones. Within the national working group, a women's champions wing coordinates the organization of roundtables and targeted skills development for its women members. Roundtable discussions feed into dialogue platforms that on a regular basis are organized by the federation at national and sonor levels to communicate with stakeholders, such as government and the private sector. The women's champions wing also coordinates activities with women advocates, coaches and business mentors at the sonor and local levels. They do trainings and coaching in various areas ranging from leadership to business development. Collectively, these women champions have been put in place by GAFAP to ensure that women equally benefit from the opportunities created through its work. From this organizational setup, GAFAP have been able to identify strategic priorities of particular concern to their women members. One of them is the over-exploitation and competition over the Shia and Baobab trees in the savannah zone. This is creating all sorts of problems for women's Shia and Baobab cooperatives in the region. To improve the protection of these resources, GAFAP members are working with the local traditional chiefs, law enforcement agencies and charcoal producers to integrate local bylaws with national level legislation. This way, chiefs will get support in the governance of their territories and charcoal producers who switch from wood to woodlots will get support from GAFAP to access higher value markets. Another identified priority was to support village savings and loans associations to formalize into credit unions. These are common initiatives among mainly women members. However, when looking into the status of these, GAFAP found much to its surprise that collectively members save up to four million dollars a year in the villages. Not only is there a need to keep such amounts in a safer place than the village cash box, but also this amount of savings should open opportunities for something more. By formalizing into credit unions, members are more likely to be able to leverage investment from other sources and grow their businesses. So what lessons can we draw from this so far? This vertical and horizontal organization has helped build a critical mass of women that can bring attention to these issues from a landscape and broader socio economic perspective. The implications of these enterprises failing will have much broader consequences for entire communities and potentially regions. In this way, GAFAP have been able to move away from a tendency to treat issues as women's issues, but as common challenges, they need a solution. This is further reinforced by its ability to convene and create incentives for each of the key stakeholders to buy into a joint solution to the problem. From these case studies, we have identified factors that enable local women to voice their concerns, needs and interest in public or private governance. The case studies show that a supportive environment starts with an enabling institutional and legislative framework. We see a positive relationship between a heavily decentralized institutional framework with clear structures and bottom-up processes and women's ability to influence decisions. Decentralized governance make it easier for rules and decisions to be made and adopted locally and they are more likely to generate community-wide benefits and ownership. They also highlight the role a progressive law or structure that help women participate in decision-making processes can make. Within this context, democratically governed members-based institutions, be it a producer organization or a village council, can also act as an important vehicle for change. At the community and household levels, there are also some basic steps that can be taken to create a more supportive environment. Ensuring meetings are held at times that work for women and with forward warnings so that childcare can be arranged are simple but crucial examples of best practice. Women should be able to attend meetings without a male relative's consent, but this is not always the case. And because this can be quite sensitive, it is also important to engage men and community leaders in conversations about gender roles and division of labor to create support and reduce these tensions. Beyond the supportive environment, there are key ingredients needed to make participation occur and foster. First, there is the question of building individual skills of women. Across cases, we have found that skills in education play a huge role for women to participate in governance and decision processes. Whether this is more basic skills like reading, writing, counting or towards managing small stands, small businesses up to graduate education. We found that professional and personal individual experiences that give women confidence in speaking out are extremely important. We also found that legal and technical knowledge can elevate a woman's confidence. So women need to know their rights, but also have technical knowledge of the issues at stake, whether this relates to farming, seeds, land, but also how institutions work. But individual skills alone are not enough. Women's group in networks are key, not only in amplifying the voices of women who already participate, but also supporting the engagement of new members in these communities. Menwheres give women support, agency, a common and amplified voice that is more likely to be heard, but also give women role models for more participation. Individual and collective efforts are both needed at the same time in order to build critical mass so voices are heard at scale. Working horizontally and vertically is essential, as we've seen from the reach and influence of women in organic study. The work of DCF in Senegal shows it. A genderless is simply not enough. So we need to work on women's participation at devolved local levels and at national policy levels and at every stage of the planning cycles. Women are 50% of the world's population and it's time to stop treating gender as an add-on. It just doesn't work to truly get critical mass. Doing this means focusing both on short and long-term pathways to get this critical mass. Changes are not going to happen overnight, but small steps taken now really help. For example, using bylaws and having practical, power-sensitive engagement can help immediately. But we should never forget to work on long-term pathways of change, such as women's education, which is what will help shape future generations. Long-term pathways are needed to shift social norms and specifically get the recognition of women's roles in society. These social changes need time to seep in, down into entering household dynamics that we know often shape how women will participate. Throughout this work, we've noted several known challenges. Now, this isn't very surprising considering most projects still address gender work in silos. It's great that we see more projects specifically targeting women, but again, that's not enough. Women, communities and societies won't overcome these known challenges as long as we don't start working in a more holistic way. Now, there's a new challenge we've encountered and that's a question of how to work with intersectionality. Or in other words, how to really engage with the different identities that women and girls have. We know that women, people, don't identify with just one social group. That said, we still engage and approach projects with very structured, affiliated categories for social groups. We engage with men, women, youth, elders, other marginalized groups. But for example, what about educated girls from marginalized groups versus non-marginized groups, non-educated girls? How different or similar are they in what they need to improve their participation? We don't have the answer now, but part of our next steps is to look into how to identify differential experiences of participation first and then structure project activities accordingly. Here, tools exist, but more application is needed. For example, using power analysis that have inductive and deductive approaches at project inception to avoid falling into classical categories and the trap that they represent. So what's next? Well, these of course are initial findings and there is a need for more fine-grained and in-depth analysis in order to develop projects and programs which address both the practical and structural constraints to women's voices. Of course, context matters and there are no blanket solutions. But as a starting point, we would really like to see women's participation in decision making becoming a high priority on national and international agendas. This was actually the case at CSW last month, but we need to keep the momentum going and we need to develop ambitious programs which promote better and gender-sensitive governance in all sectors. Governance and decision making processes are everywhere. They are at the core of societies and communities and they shape the world of tomorrow. Thank you.