 We will present you today's work done by a group of us and a gender unit, Life Second Fish, across the different value chain countries. The title goes Gender Capacity Assessment and Development in 4 Life Second Fish value chain countries. These are Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nicaragua and Uganda. In this presentation, we shall be going through the importance or advantages of conducting a gender capacity assessment. We shall walk through the framework that we use to assess gender capacities of our partners. At the level of analysis, the tools we use and then I'll share with you our experience from using this methodology, some of the key findings, conclusions and what we plan to do after that. So why gender capacity assessment? As we all know, it's one of the components under the capacity development unit, but also under Life Second Fish gender strategy, capacity development is one of our key outputs. And we endeavor so much to develop the capacities of the partners we work with, but also our staff, I should say, to ensure that we all work towards the gender equality goal, one of our mandates as illeread. So we do this gender capacity assessment of our partners to ensure that we identify the gaps and these are gender capacity gaps in our programs, in our organizations. And through this gender capacity assessment, you're able to capture information that provides a starting point for working on a gender capacity development strategy. And this strategy, of course, is informed by the gaps that you have identified. And through conducting gender capacity assessment, you're able to identify opportunities to invest your resources. And when you talk about resources, it's not only financial resources. To be able to develop the capacities of an organization, we need the human resource. People who are implementing the gender related activities in an organization to help you implement the interventions that will lead to gender equity. In addition to that, we also argue that conducting a gender capacity assessment helps you identify some of the partners that you can work with to strengthen the gender initiative in the organization. And this assessment also establishes the baseline and indicators that you can use to monitor progress towards gender capacity development of your staff. And these pictures basically show some of the activities that we've done so far using our methodology. So for us to be able to identify the gender gaps in organizations, come up with some of the indicators to monitor, to be able to identify who to work with to deliver on the gender equality goal. We need a more systematic and comprehensive tool to capture that information that we can use. Last year we had a tool, but it was a very basic tool to help us assist the capacity of our partners. And early this year, we noted that actually that tool did not capture so much in the information help us come up with a more rigorous intervention. So early this year, literally commissioned a team of consultants from Transition International to work closely with the gender team in the Life Second Fish Research Program. And we work closely to develop a more comprehensive and systematic tool and methodology to help us assist in the capacities of our partners. And what this tool basically does, it helps you identify the current levels of capacities which you measure against the desired levels. And it's a three-dimensional framework that we basically drill on. And this framework, first of all, it assesses the core gender capacities. And these are the capacities that we thought were very key for an organization or an individual to be able to deliver on the gender mandate. And there are three levels of analysis which I'll walk through later on. And we have key partners whose capacities we mostly assess, including development partners and those are the partners who adopt our technologies and bring them to scale. And we also have national research partners with whom we collaborate in coming up with appropriate technologies. So going back to the core gender capacities, what we need to do as other staff or partners to be able to integrate gender in our work to close the gender gap in agriculture. One of the core capacities is gender analysis and strategic planning. So what do we assess here? Here we look at the capacity of our partners to conduct gender analysis. And when we talk about gender analysis, we are looking at the capacities to look or analyze the relationships between men and women, the power differences between men and women. And here you can ask questions such as who does what, who makes decisions on what, who owns what, but based on a systematic definition of the gender relations they're trying to tease out. And it's not all about analyzing the gender relations or the relations between men and women, but it's about the capacity to also use this information to inform your next interventions. You don't keep the results on your shelves, but you're supposed to use these results to inform our next interventions that will directly benefit both men and women that you work with. The next core gender capacities is effective partnerships and advocacy on promoting gender equity. And what do we mean by this? We don't work alone, we work with partners and if at all we are to maximize impact we need different partners who can help us deliver on this mandate. So here we assess the capacity to identify partners and not any partner, but partners with the skills or the resources to deliver on the gender mandate. That is the capacity to analyze gender but also the capacity to ensure that the interventions will increase men and women's access to and control resources. Then advocacy, do these partners have the capacity or the materials that help them advocate for gender equity or influence government to integrate gender in the policies to ensure that both men and women benefit directly from the interventions in place. Then the other core gender capacities is gender responsive programming, budgeting and implementing. And here we look at the gender responsiveness of the different interventions that different organizations have in place. To what extent are they gender responsive and when we talk about gender responsiveness are they addressing the interests for the needs of men and women. And are there resources, for example, budgets specifically allocated to gender related interventions. Then the other core capacity is knowledge management and gender responsive M and E. And here we look at the capacity to collect sex disaggregated data, use this data, analyze it and use it to inform interventions but also monitor the impact of your interventions on both men and women. They could be possible negative impacts but you have the capacity to do that to collect this data and monitor your interventions and report on the gender impacts. And gender leadership, here we look at the capacity for example of the leadership or the leaders in the organization to guide the team, guide the staff to deliver on your vision and this is the gender equality vision and the leaders have the capacity to do that. How about the commitment to gender equity the commitment to hire women to ensure that there is equity within the organization your gender balance within the organization and the last core gender capacity that we look at is innovation in gender responsive approaches and these are basically approaches that we use to increase women's access to and control resources and these are approaches that also help us transform some of the constraining norms that hinder women's access to and control resources. So those are the key core capacities that we assess and these are capacities that we think that an organization or at least an individual should be able to have or should have to be able to deliver on the gender equity goal. So we do this assessment on this is the next slide. And this next slide basically presents the different levels of analysis. We do not look at individuals alone but look at the organization as a whole and also the environment around us. When you're looking at the individuals who assess the skills, the knowledge and their motivation to integrate gender in their work and individuals work for organizations of course but within the organization how do the internal policies, procedures or arrangements enable individuals or hinder them to deliver on their mandate. How about the enabling environment which is kind of beyond us at national level? How do the policies in place or regulations enable us or enable an institution to deliver on the gender equality goal? So those are the levels of analysis that we normally do analysis on. Now using the methodology that we developed together with Transition International we're able to carry out assessments in four value chain countries. Ethiopia being one of them, Tanzania, Nicaragua and Uganda as mentioned before. And in total we assessed 24 development partners and research partners and these are partners that were strategically selected based on their commitment to gender within the value chain but also the active involvement in the value chain. And the details of these can be found in our reports who we really assist in the different countries. Now how is this methodology structured? We use the framework that I mentioned to you before but for us to capture detailed information that will enhance analysis at the different levels we use three tools. One of them I would call them tools or methodology one of them is a focus group discussion and this is basically the starting point when trying to understand the capacities within an organization. And here to be able to conduct a focus group discussion that will give you rich information that will give information that will help you clearly understand the capacities within an organization and the opportunities or constraints within the organization who invite staff and this could be at different levels middle or high level staff but to select them strategically to ensure that all the members present can hear all their views freely. So it's normally a maximum of about let's say eight people and it's a guided focus group discussion using a checklist which has systematic questions and normally it's facilitated by a gender expert truly has a clear understanding of gender issues in an organization and as you walk through this tool partners normally assess their capacities and give themselves scores based on how they think their capacities are developed at organizational level. Now after the focus group discussion we select individuals normally it depends on how big the focus group discussion is but individuals further assess their capacities and these are the capacities that we talked about before in the framework the key core capacities and we have forms to do that we have the Google Forms this can be done online but the forms can also be printed out and have partners fill out the hard copies but researchers need to fill out this information online to be able to analyze the data then we have the key format interviews and basically these key formats give us information from broader perspective at national level and these key formats also have to be strategically selected because you want who will give you thorough information about the enabling environment the policies in place and how these are helping different organizations or staff to integrate gender in their work and as I said before addressing the capacities there is a scale 1 to 5 1 being the least and 5 being the highest and when you score a 5 it means your gender capacity is fully developed and normal capacity development is actually needed you are good to go this next slide gives you kind of a snapshot of what we use to key in this course each core gender capacity has different parameters that partners normally discuss and gauge themselves so on my extreme is it extreme left we have the parameters as you see A2.1 that's a parameter that will help us assess the organization's capacity to conduct gender analysis and plan strategically the middle column is where we record our scores and the last column is where we document the discussion it's very important to capture the qualitative data and these are the discussions that go on as partners assess their capacities you can't rely on the scores alone because they may not tell you much but what is behind that score is what you really need to be able to come up with good indicators but also areas where you're interviewing so what are some of the key results from conducting gender capacity assessments of our partners in the four value chain countries as I said we did the assessment of the environmental level in video and organizational level so from that assessment we noticed that the governments of Nicaragua and Ethiopia have relatively well developed in the policies and these are policies that basically guide the nation as a whole but also the institutions to implement interventions that increase men and women's access to resources but also ensure that women who are disempowered are empowered to improve their livelihoods by accessing better opportunities available at national level and we also noticed that with this good enabling environment with good policies the partners in Nicaragua scored kind of better developed capacities compared to the partners in the three countries Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia and of all the four countries we noticed that partners in Ethiopia had kind of the least developed capacities we also noticed that development partners scored relatively higher on all the core capacities compared to the research partners it was kind of a striking finding which we didn't expect but actually it is development partners we thought had better developed capacities because they are more exposed to other organizations to work with other organizations that deliver the gender mandate so in one or another their skills are enhanced then we also noticed that there was kind of interest, high interest and commitment to support gender and leadership and this kind of scored higher and this is not the actual capacity of the leadership team to guide staff to deliver on the gender mandate but it was just having the commitment to ensure that there is maybe gender equity within an organization but not the actual capacity to lead and guide staff to deliver on that vision and then what scored least was the capacity to apply or implement gender innovative innovative approaches and these are approaches that matter transforming the norms or attitudes that constrain women from accessing and controlling resources so this graph basically highlights the overall kind of level of capacities that we have among us all the partners that we assist in the four value change countries and here of course you see Ethiopia with the gray bar scoring a bit lower and Uganda but Nicaragua really stands out clearly that the capacities were more developed and from the case of Ethiopia to just give you kind of a more detailed analysis of how we how partners scored again is all the other capacities we noticed that at organizational level of course the involvement partners score slightly higher compared to the national research partners and at individual level we also noticed that the individual capacities were slightly higher compared to organizational capacities and I will not go without saying that if at all you dig deeper into the analysis you notice that different organizations scored differently on all these capacities these are kind of generalized but in look at how different organizations scored in the different countries you come up with different results some are strong in one area others are weak in another area and that helps you target your interventions so in conclusion within and between partners in the four countries we noticed that there are differences in their capacities in that you can't really come up with the one size fits all intervention you need to understand where the weaknesses are for a particular partner and then develop tailor made intervention to suit the needs of that partner and because the conditions also vary across all the countries we argue that actually there should be partner specific recommendations and overall development partners of course go slightly higher and we need supportive institutions to help us really deliver on this mandate to be able to narrow the gender inequalities in agriculture and these are basically we will talk about institutions we are looking at the policies in place the regulation plus also the procedures within organizations and the commitment of our leaders to gender equity and what's our way forward after conducting this assessment we plan to share our results with our partners particularly those who participated in this assessment Tanzania has already shared the results with the partners they went ahead to further prioritize their intervention areas the capacity that they thought was really very important to them to develop at the critical moment and we are yet to do that in Nicaragua, Ethiopia and Uganda and after that we will design and implement country specific interventions but as I said before we have to look at which partner is strong in what area and we look in what area and they will drill on that to enhance their capacities and after that we will be measuring the outcomes of the impact of these interventions and that's where our research component will come in and we have materials in place that you can refer to if I told you interested in this methodology and I had more members on this slide but of course we acknowledge partners that we work with we have staff from Mikada, Siat who helped us implement its assessment but we also have colleagues who left Ileri who had actively engaged in this entire process right from the beginning people like Diana I think she started this we had our research technicians who left Millicent and Violet and this really helped us a lot Thank you