The centres of excellence for gender mainstreaming concept is a follow up to the gender and local government research, strategies and Gender and GBV action plans roll-out that have been taking place from 2007 - 2010 across municipalities in the SADC region that Gender Links has been working with. This follow up concept seeks to ensure that key councils are identified across the region and worked with very closely in their process of getting gender on their council's agenda. This takes place through sustained interventions that bring together policy, implementation, capacity building through-on-the-job training, monitoring and evaluation and the annual sharing of good practices at the annual Gender Justice and Local Government Summit.

The approach builds on experience that GL has gained over several years in working with media houses on developing and implementing gender policies and action plans through a six stage processes, as well as several years collaboration with the City of Johannesburg on its gender audit, policy and gender mainstreaming programme. The approach also seeks to develop synergy in GL programme work by focusing various projects from our SADC Gender Protocol, governance, media and justice programmes in specific localities. These include: including the GBV and local government action plans; on-the-job training for women in politics; village workshops on the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development and media literacy. Working closely with the local government associations with whom we have close links, we will seek to mobilize resources and create multiplier effects from the initial 100 councils in at least ten countries that we work with and ultimately add ten new councils to the COE process in each of the ten countries that GL works. Click here to view the concept paper on the centres of excellence for gender mainstreaming at local level.

Click here to download the generic training manual for the Centres of Excellence.

The COE roll out process has a target of 100 municipal councils in the 10 countries for the period 2009/ 2010. Click on each country to view the councils' stages in the process.

Botswana	Lesotho	Madagascar	Mauritius	Mozambique
Namibia	South Africa	Swaziland	Zambia	Zimbabwe