Understanding of gender issues is crucial to the success of development projects. Donor agencies have been stressing the involvement of women in development projects since a long time but somehow it doesn’t happen due to lack of understanding on gender mainstreaming and also due to lack of know-how of integrating gender into project planning and implementation.

In absence of gender knowledge, monitoring and evaluation officers find it hard to understand the importance of integrating gender into M&E plan, indicators and data and therefore evaluation reports often do not effectively capture the information about program’s impacts on women or on gender relations.

The same goes with project budgeting. Due to lack of knowledge on gender and gender sensitive budgeting, the project budgets and project activities do not reflect gender sensitivity and budgets often fail to address both women’s and men’s needs.

In order to address these challenges and to provide service providers, M&E officers, finance officers, applied knowledge on gender mainstreaming in development projects, APMAS-Gender Sensitive Management Project organized a training workshop in Phnom Penh during 22-23 May. The training aimed to address the issues of gender mainstreaming in project planning & design, gender sensitive project monitoring, evaluation and gender responsive project budgeting.

The participants were invited from various Cambodian organizations working in the development sector, local NGOs, International Organizations, Ministry of Women’s affairs, Donor funded projects, etc. The training workshop was well received and generated a lot of discussions among participants about local gender issues and how to address them in the Cambodian cultural context.

The training workshop also facilitated networking among development organizations. APMAS-GSM had collaborated with Wetlands Alliance Program (WAP) (http://www.wetlandsalliance.org/) and WorldFish, Cambodia to organize this training workshop. WAP is the alliance of regional organizations AIT, CORIN-ASIA (http://corin-asia.org/), World Fish Center (WorldFish) (http://www.worldfishcenter.org/), and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) (http://wwf.panda.org/) . The alliance has almost 50 local partners in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam. Their local partners include development organizations, NGOs and local communities. There are also opportunities that the local NGOs and organizations could become potential service providers or development partners to IFAD funded projects in Cambodia.

The training agenda, training materials, and other information is attached herewith. Should you need any more information about this training, please contact jagriti@ait.asia.