TMA is committed to ensuring that men and women gain equal opportunities from the organisation’s initiatives that are geared at increased trade and business competitiveness. As with Strategy I, TMA will continue with a targeted approach through the Women in Trade programme under Outcome 2 – Improved Business Competitiveness. This is complemented by a mainstreaming approach that aims to ensure all interventions make gender considerations throughout the project management cycle.

In Gender Strategy 1, TMA made significant progress in mainstreaming gender in programming, building the abilities of staff and partners. This delivered impressive results at programme level, within implementing partner organisations and at corporate level.

This has been a good starting point for TMA where tracking and reporting on sex-disaggregated data and results spreads across all TMA’s work, as well as addressing what corresponds to the first level of gender mainstreaming, through focusing on women’s more practical trade-related needs. Changing the limiting gender norms that affect trade is a long-term process. It requires a good understanding of the issues, design of strategic interventions and committed implementation and results measurement to achieve sustainable, inclusive and equitable change over longer periods of time.

The focus for the coming year will be the roll out and implementation of TMA’s Gender Strategy II (2018-2023), especially focusing on achieving the gender commitments in the corporate results framework (below):

Impact level: Evidence of women’s empowerment

Outcome level: Proportion of programmes exploring opportunities to successfully mainstream gender

A more participatory approach was adapted in the development of Gender Strategy II. This entailed a comprehensive review of Gender Strategy I (2015-2017) its implementation and lessons learnt, followed by an internal focus group discussion on priority areas for Gender Strategy II and piloting of the gender mainstreaming tool with country programme teams.

For more information visit https://gender.trademarkea.com/