Gender Equality Training for Facilitators at BREADS

BREADS organised a three days follow up training for facilitators on gender equality in June 2016. BREADS’ project on women empowerment through gender equality is being implemented by Don Bosco centers at 5 districts in Karnataka from 2015. Training on gender equality for different focus groups like women, community, students, Govt officials, NGOs etc. is the main attention in the programme. Staff or the facilitators play a very important role to motivate the target group to respond to gender equality and the patriarchal society that we live in makes gender equality a difficult change. Six months of implementation of the programme called for a follow up training for facilitators on gender equality.

The training started with an evaluation of the programme by the BREADS team. This helped the team to analyse the achievements, outcome, challenges, and pitfalls during implementation. Group discussion helped the team to cull out different strategies to address the challenges. Ms. Kanmani from Break Through organisation did a half day session on gender equality. Her experience in the field for the past decade came handy during the training to address issues faced by the facilitators in the community. She also shared a few promotion videos on gender equality and voice against domestic violence, developed by Break Through. The following two days were handled by Ms. Asha from Vistar on gender analysis and tools for gender analysis. She started the session with an activity to review the topics of the first training and remind the participants about the previous training. She used real life examples from her experience to disseminate the ideas of gender analysis. Gender analysis was done in different levels like individual, family, community and organisation. Finally the participants in groups were given platform to do mock training so that they can do the training better in the field. This segment gave the participants a very good opportunity to assess their skills and improving on it. Methods like group activities, role play, group discussions, documentary were used during the training, this made it more participatory and lively. The group evaluated that the training have capacitated them to implement the programme more effectively