South Africa: Gender Links to host third annual Southern Africa gender justice and local government regional summit and awards

Gender Links (GL) will be holding the third annual regional Gender Justice and Local Government Regional Summit and Awards from 16 – 18 April 2012 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Under the banner “365 days of local action to end gender violence: halve gender violence by 2015” the summit will show case best practices in mainstreaming gender and ending gender violence at the local level.

While the summit call is open to all councils and community based organisations, GL is specifically targeting the 117 local councils that are part of the Centres of Excellence Initiative to submit entries for good practices in mainstreaming Gender at the local level.

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 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.

This will be the first year that GL pilot’s in country mini-summit model in Botswana, Madagascar, Mauritius, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe that will have winners at the in-country participating and competing at the regional summit. In Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa and Swaziland entries will be screened and proceed straight to the country summit.

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