Since its establishment in February 2000, Gender Links has been involved in several consultancies to provide advisory services to regional and international organisations, as well as government departments, on gender mainstreaming, including the SADC Secretariat, UNDP South Africa and the South African Department of Social Development.

Why
Gender inequality is deeply ingrained in all sectors and areas of society and it takes concreted effort by individuals and organisations to redress these imbalances. The UNDP defines gender mainstreaming as: "Taking account of gender equality in all policy, programme, administrative and financial activities and in organisational procedures, thereby contributing to a profound organisational transformation." Gender mainstreaming involves internal transformation as well as integrating gender considerations into key tools of governance.

How
Gender links provides assistance to organisations in developing workplace gender policies and gender mainstreaming toolkits which are critical to ensuring that gender is mainstreamed at all levels of programming within organisations. The policies and toolkits are tailored made and relevant to the organisations in addressing the challenges that they face in engendering programmes and policies. There is a strong emphasis on both individual and institutional capacity building. The toolkits provide the target group with the competency to ensure that at the stage of implementation gender is taken into account in design, training and capacity building, monitoring and evaluation and finally allocation of resources for programmes and policies.

Scroll down and view some of the work GL has done in this area.

Contact
Mukayi Makaya, GL Services Manager, glservices@genderlinks.org.za 
Phone: 27 (0) 11 487 2329 or Fax: 27 (0) 11 622 4732.