What we do and how

WHAT WE DO – We often work together bringing our experience of women’s and girls’ human rights and gender equality to our work. We have worked on programmes with a focus on violence against women and girls, women’s political participation, girls’ education, challenging discriminatory gender norms, and working with the media. We enjoy working with both large and small organisations as well as donors helping them achieve change. We work on the following:

  • organisational change processes – e.g. gender mainstreaming including gender equality reviews/audits and action plans; strategic planning and organisational development
  • organisational and programmatic guidance, developing and delivering training, mentoring and coaching and tools development
  • organisational and programmatic theories of change and action
  • multi-sectoral gender transformative programme design
  • participatory monitoring, elevation and learning (PMEL), learning reviews
  • programme research – especially participatory, qualitative research
  • child protection and safeguarding

HOW WE WORK – we are guided by the following feminist principles which we endeavour to apply to all the work we undertake. Sometimes this means challenging or contesting pre-prescribed frameworks or tools to allow the lived experiences of women and girls in all their diversity to be given space.

1.     Learning about how and why change takes place in order to advance social justice goals, whilst engaging stakeholders in analysing change processes. 

2.    Putting an understanding of staff’s and programme participants’, especially women’s and girls’ as well as those with diverse sexual orientation and gender identities, lived experiences at the centre of our work by encouraging participants to define and discuss what is important to them so that the process can be of value and use to participants themselves in terms of experiential and reflective learning.  

3.     Listening to multiple voices by exploring perspectives of female and male staff, men and family members of women and girls and stakeholders 

4.     Bringing an awareness of our own power and privilege and how that may be perceived by programme stakeholders and staff 

5.  Understanding the significance and specificity of diverse countries and programme contexts which shape women’s and girls’ participation in and experience of programmes 

6.  Paying due attention to the ethical aspects of our research, which is likely to involve discussion of sensitive issues (including unintended or negative outcomes) and ensuring participants’ informed consent to engagement in any research process. 

7.   Taking a flexible, iterative approach – in recognition of the fact that many monitoring evaluation and learning (MEL) frameworks and tools are not feminist in their principles or methodology, nor are they designed to take into account some of the challenges generated by feminist interventions, such as power shifts, backlash, long time scales etc