Welcome to Capacity4dev

Hi and Welcome!

This is the DG ECHO Gender Working Group on Capacity4dev. The purpose of this group is to capitalise knowledge and experiences and act as a platform for knowledge sharing. Initially it was supposed to be a closed group only for ECHO staff but in order to make it a more vibrant and interactive space we decided to open it up to the public. In order to disseminate DG ECHO's new Gender Policy and Gender-Age Marker ECHO cannot be operating on its own. Therefore this group also presents a good opportunity for ECHO staff to interact with our partners, other donors and the wider humanitarian community.

As already mention the objective of this group is to disseminate DG ECHO's new Gender Policy and gender-Age Marker. The EU Staff Working Document Gender in Humanitarian Aid: Different Needs, Adapted Assistance was adopted in July 2013 and it outlines the Commission's approach to gender and gender-based violence in humanitarian aid. It aims to improve the quality of humanitarian assistance through actions that effectively respond to the specific needs of women, girls, boys and men. This will be achieved through gender integration, participation and protection. In order to support policy implementation and coherence, a gender-age maker was designed to foster and track gender- and age- sensitive programming and will be applied to all funded actions in 2014. This is a unique tool that builds on lessons learned from existing markers and represents a new generation of assessment tools.

In this Capacity4dev-group you will be able to find more in depths information on the DG ECHO Gender policy and Gender-Age Marker. Under "LIBRARY" you will find both the EU Staff Working Document Gender in Humanitarian Aid: Different Needs, Adapted Assistance as well as the Gender-Age Marker Toolkit. You will also find training materials, power point presentations and a facilitator's guide so you can conduct your own training session about the Gender-Age Marker. Here you can also find a document called frequently asked questions, which is supposed to be a living document which is regularly going to be updated. To be able to do so I will need your feedback and questions, so please post your question or let me know if some questions are not useful. You can either in the comment section in the library or if you prefer to be anonymous you can just email me.

The idea is also that this can be a platform to share information about gender and age sensitive programming. So please feel free to share reports and information from your organisation, country or latest mission, either by creating a blog post or by uploading a document in the library.

I hope you will find this group useful and help you in work. If you have any questions you are always welcome to email me.

Best regards, Hanna

Hanna Persson

Gender Policy Officer
DG  Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO)
Unit A4 – Specific Thematic Policies
hanna.persson@ext.ec.europa.eu

ECHO-GENDER-AGE-MARKER@ec.europa.eu