IIEP-Buenos Aires will be integrating a gender perspective into all of its projects

16 March 2018

On Friday 9 March, IIEP’s office for Latin America held a workshop for its staff on strategies of how to integrate a gender perspective into the office’s four lines of work: Training, Technical Cooperation, Research and Knowledge Sharing. The workshop was given by IIEP’s own expert on gender mainstreaming, Mioko Saito, as well as Andrea Balzano, who is the gender focal point of UNDP Argentina. It was attended by 26 staff members.

The goal of the workshop was to highlight how gender inequalities pose a threat to the right to education for all in Latin America, alongside other forms of discrimination such as the ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. In this vein, the strategies presented during the workshop are valuable tools that can be used to reduce multiple types of discrimination. 

Gender mainstreaming in education planning seeks to reduce gender inequalities by taking the needs of boys and girls into account during the design, implementation and evaluation of education plans and projects.

In the past 10 years, IIEP has increased its dedication to reducing gender inequalities by making the topic an ever more central part of its work. In 2008 a mapping of all gender-related projects was launched. By 2010 first gender mainstreaming exercises were conducted and since 2014 the reduction of gender inequalities has been one of the institute’s strategic priorities.

The emphasis on reducing gender inequality in education is of key importance for two reasons: Firstly, by constituting the space in which a large part of children´s socialization takes place; education plays a key role in achieving gender equality. Depending on how education is organized, it can either reinforce stereotypes and discrimination or work to reduce them. Secondly, gender equality is key to achieving the right to education for all by reducing inequalities in access to education, inequality of treatment in the classroom and inequality of learning outcomes.

Read this news on the IIPE Buenos Aires website (in Spanish).