 Hi, my name is Helen Ampham. I'm a technical specialist for gender livelihoods and governance within the livelihoods and governance team at Fauna and Flora International or FFI. I've been at FFI for about 10 years now and prior to that I worked for CAFOD, which is one of the main UK development NGOs, where I was involved in some gender work and I brought that interest with me when I joined the conservation sector. So I just like to take a very brief moment to reflect on the roots of the international conservation movement, which was established during the colonial era. FFI itself was established in 1903 as the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire and in her series in Gendering Eden, Fiona Flinton wrote that conservation policy was led by man. So perhaps this is one contributing factor to the historical exclusion of women in conservation. Of course, FFI has undergone something of an evolution itself, a transformation since 1903. There are now more women than men in FFI's senior management team and gender is one of our core themes or approaches within the conservation and livelihoods team. There are other signs of progress, my role for a start. Gender came formally part of my role just this year in March and my job title. There's a lot more profile and discussion around gender both inside and outside of FFI. Many organisations now have gender policies. When I first joined FFI, I could find only one, which was IECNs. There's a lot more desegregation of data and more and more project reports are referring to men and women and live different outcomes they experience, rather than talking about people and communities. There's an increased interest in what I term women's projects and women's empowerment. Although I think some of these are still based on a rather narrow understanding of empowerment and tend to focus on economic empowerment. I believe there is a need to go beyond women's projects because on their own, they have limited impact on gender equality. Nevertheless, I was encouraged to see that in FFI's 2017 conservation report, this text and picture on the left appeared and to my knowledge, that's the first time that women's empowerment has been mentioned in such a high level report for FFI. More work and attention has been given by staff to support women's participation in projects based on an understanding of the barriers that women face. Myself and my colleague in the livelihoods and governance team are receiving more requests for support. All these things might appear to be small steps, but for FFI, I think we've made quite a lot of progress over the last decade and we're not near gender equality yet, gender transformative approach, but we're making small steps. But I do think more attention needs to be given to the quality of women's participation. Is it nominal or is it interactive and empowered participation? And I think despite a lot of progress around understanding what gender is, there's still a tendency across conservation NGOs generally to focus on women rather than gender and I will come back to that. So what has brought this about? So obviously the world has evolved and changed and conservation has changed with it. There's a lot more focus now on community participation and human rights. There's been development in conservation policy as Andrea referred to and donors are now increasingly insisting that projects include gender. There's a lot of collaboration across sectors, including with development NGOs, particularly at project level and also with academic institutions and all those factors I think have contributed to the changes within FFI, but also I would like to acknowledge the work of the livelihoods and governance team in promoting gender. I think FFI's quite unique organisational culture has helped because even though there was nothing in my terms of reference previously and no formal gender policy, I was supported as an individual to work on gender and to explore project ideas. And over the time I've been at FFI, there's a definite increase in the number of individuals who are interested and engaging on gender and I was lucky enough to get a small grant to work on gender with a partner in Northern Kenya and I think that helped to raise the profile and interest across the organisation of gender. So what has constrained progress? Well many conservationists are natural scientists and perhaps for some men are seen as natural conservation partners but in any case all of us are affected by our own cultural and social norms and we all have unconscious biases that we're not aware of. None of us are immune from that. This focus on women I think it is necessary as are women's projects because of their disadvantage position but on their own I think these type of projects have limited impact. Obviously they have significant impact for the individual women involved but they're unlikely to challenge existing gender norms and dynamics and similarly I think there's a need to promote more than activity specific participation. So women's participation is a partial solution but on its own it's not enough. We need to carry out gender analysis and we need to respond to this analysis within our projects and programmes so lack of analysis is a constraint and it tends to be inadequate and only carried out at the beginning of projects and also even where there is interest and engagement it often slips as the project progresses in the face of other demands. I've been told previously less so recently but it's not our place to interfere with other cultures and that by working on gender and promoting women's empowerment and equality and that is what I'm doing but in my experience it tends to be people from outside of a culture that expresses concerns with regards to working on gender and I think we can work on gender in a culturally sensitive way by working with local men and women supporting them to effect change and working with them at a pace that they're comfortable with and obviously lack of funds is a big issue and despite owners requiring extra attention being given to gender and gender integration they don't necessarily provide the resources for doing so and it becomes another demand on already stretched staff and it's not just about funds it's about other resources as well and often within development within NGOs the responsibility for gender is given to just one person whereas it should be the responsibility of all staff in an organisation. So what difference does this make? I'd like to talk just very briefly about the project in Kenya that I referred to and one of the activities carried out was discussions around gender with groups of men and women and the facilitators initially felt a bit of pushback there's this perception that women can't, women can't be leaders, can't make decisions, can't be involved in issues of security but in even in a relatively short period of time and with limited input that project contributed to a number of positive changes and these were identified by the men and women themselves. So we know that women are benefiting from work to promote gender integration into projects because they tell us and as noted previously we're increasingly collecting disaggregated data and ensuring that surveys and assessments specifically seek women's views but within the conservation sector I think we're less good at making the connections between conservation outcomes and social outcomes so we collect social data and we collect biodiversity or natural data but we struggle sometimes making the links between them and I think another challenge is that we tend to use the household as the unit of analysis so we contribute to positive outcomes at the household level but we potentially miss intra household dynamics such as the distribution and control of income food or workload and how our work impacts on these. However I think assessing the social incomes of gender integration is perhaps easier in some ways than making the link with conservation outcomes and I don't think SFI is alone in not having quite reached that stage and I referred to a working paper where the authors reviewed a large body of literature to identify factors that improve resource governance and conservation when women have a say or interactively actively participate in forest and fisheries management and the evidence suggests that mixed gender groups where women are active and listen to tend to be more effective have better governance and therefore increase resource regeneration but as noted previously it's not just about women's participation we have to pay attention to the quality of that participation so where are we going from here I think I will skip through some of these points because they're about SFI but they're not unique to SFI I just to say that within the development sector gender audits have been proven to be a catalyst for organisational gender integration and mainstreaming and as I mentioned there's a need for more and more in-depth gender analysis beyond the superficial and I think a really great approach is action learning because it's about both individual and organisational change but I just like to touch upon some focus areas that I think are important for the conservation sector and particularly NGOs to reflect on issue about intersectionality so women are not homogeneous not all men hold more power than all women and gender intersects with other factors of social diversity such as race class and age and inequality and marginalisation is not a result of just one factor I know it seems like I'm stating the obvious but gender is about women and men but even so in practice I think there's a need to engage more with men as well as with women in working towards gender equality and talked a bit about the quality of women's participation already we need to think about how women and other marginalised people and groups participate in processes and the structural and systemic barriers that prevent them from empowered participation and this includes thinking about cultural and social norms so working with and supporting local people men and women who are seeking to make positive changes in their own culture and societies so I think it's helpful to think about the gender integration continuum in a lot of conservation practice has been accommodating so it works around existing gender differences and inequalities becoming increasingly gender sensitive so understanding gender differences and norms and doing no harm but what we should be aiming for is gender transformative approaches so strengthening and creating systemic changes and addressing historical biases and I think there also needs to be more work around how gender equity and equality relate to the recently developed frameworks around equity in conservation so thank you