The Gender Focal Point of the Sahara and Sahel Observatory took part in the GIZ's "Promoting the Role of Women in the Maghreb program" Capitalization and Closure Workshop, held on October 29-30, 2019, in the Algerian capital.
This workshop, which was opened by Ms. Fatma Zohra, Minister of the Environment of Algeria, aimed to bring together public, private and community operators, playing a key role in promoting and strengthening the role of women in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, in order to achieve a collective capitalization of all good practices for strengthening the role of women during the 2013-2019 period in different priority sectors: water, environment and economic and sustainable development.
The following elements, which may constitute good practices for strengthening the role of women, were identified:
• Awareness raising and use of cultural knowledge and heritage
• Building skills for better empowerment of women
• Participation in decision-making through self-esteem development, participatory governance and coaching
• Networking and self-organization of women involving commitment to a common project, extension and sharing of results
After the workshop that took the form of guided tours, participatory reflection workshops and testimonies from women who benefited from projects in the 3 countries, recommendations were made to enable to strengthen the gender approach mainstreaming and to ensure the sustainability of women's achievements in the program.
Testimonies were collected from storytellers of the Maghreb, operators of change for the preservation of water in the Maghreb. This project, linked to the Regional Cooperation for the Sustainable Management of Maghreb Water Resources | CREM project (implemented by GIZ, in collaboration with the OSS), helped a group of women train themselves to better educate children and the general public about good water management practices through storytelling.
These storytellers were able to present a series of stories on water and migration to the workshop participants.