Accelerating progress towards rural women economic empowerment (JP RWEE) programme.

Narrative description of Project:

SAFE has partnered with IFAD in consortium with other program partners to implement a Joint Program of Rural Women Economic Empowerment “JP-RWEE” with the aim to promote gender equality, rural women’s leadership and economic empowerment through the Gender Action Learning System (GALS). GALS is an innovative community-led empowerment methodology, developed by Linda Mayoux, with the support of IFAD, Oxfam Novib and HIVOS. SAFE, supported by IFAD, intends to keep on promoting the use of GALS in the Rwanda JP RWEE to respond to the need of triggering and consolidating gender changes within household and communities, ensuring sustainability of results of the JP RWEE.

The current project integrates other community needs: Nutrition and Climate change adaptation which make it GALS+. The overall goal of this activity is to promote JP RWEE’s beneficiaries’ behavioral change in their ability to analyze, plan and pursue realistic and sustainable livelihood strategies, bringing about increased gender equality, improved nutrition and better ability to adapt to climate change. GALS+ works as a development accelerator; empowering beneficiaries to make decisions over their own life and take advantage of existing opportunities, including those provided by the JP RWEE, IFAD funded projects and other development initiatives.

Participants will be able to use GALS for making more informed and equitable decisions over their livelihood options- farming and other income generating activities- enhanced with climate change adaptation and nutrition aspects. The use of GALS+ is expected to generate results that relate to better gender equality and women’s empowerment, improved nutrition and stronger adaptation capacity to climate change:

• Increased gender equality enables’ women empowerment: raising their status, economic condition and decision-making capacity at household, group and community level. Men are engaged as allies to promote win-win strategies, contributing to change gender-based roles, perception and discriminations.
• Joint livelihood planning will help GALS users to understand the effects of their interactions with people, landscapes and ecosystems, and to identify potential climate risk management strategies. GALS will also help to develop and apply climate-smart livelihood strategies to improve household climate resilience;
• Equitable and inclusive control and decision-making on the use of household’s income. GALS will promote purchasing nutritious foods (especially for women and children); increased consumption of diverse nutritious foods that address nutrition gaps; improved food safety practices, food preparation techniques that conserve nutrients and hygiene practices; improved feeding practices for infants and young children.
• Encourage household members to work together and reduce women’s workload (in particular, collecting water and fuel wood) through environmentally-beneficial solutions;

Description of actual services provided by your staff within the assignment:

The services to be provided are:

1. Include modules on climate change adaptation and nutrition in GALS, revising the manuals. GALS tools will integrate joint visioning also over the use/management of natural resources and the development of climate smart solutions and improved household nutrition practices

2. Rolling out GALS+ among 120 selected beneficiaries of the RWEE JP Kirehe district (120 champions -85 Women and 35 Men). The entry point will be 4 cooperatives of 500 members each, for a total of 1500 indirect beneficiaries.

3. Strengthen the capacity of 200 first and second-generation champions (160 women and 40 men) of the previous 19/20 GALS operations, through community follow up. This will deepen the behavior change process by strengthening their ability to use GALS and peer sharing mechanisms at community level.

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