The regional gender, peace and security theme cluster lays out plan for 2012

The year 2011 witnessed a number of milestones for the Southern Africa Gender Protocol Alliance’s gender, peace and security cluster. The regional cluster led by the Institute of Security Studies Head Office in Pretoria held four national roundtable meetings in Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Malawi and Zimbabwe, which gave birth to national working groups in each of the countries. These are all countries experiencing some form of transition and have been characterised by political conflict and to some extent politically motivated violence.

The Peace and Security cluster is one the Alliance’s nine theme clusters that is active and has leveraged off the organising mechanism of the Alliance to work at regional and national level on UN Resolution 1325 as it relates to the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development.

ISS in its role as the regional focal point has developed an action plan for 2012 to guide the work of the cluster. Key strategic actions identified include:

• Establish working groups in two more countries in the first half of 2012.
• Develop an institutional flyer for the Peace and Security cluster.
• Develop an advocacy strategy per country – for targeting parliament; civil society, security agencies in terms of developing and implementing 1325 national action plans.
• Put together an electronic monthly news-brief of what is happening in terms of gender, peace and security in the respective countries and any activities of the cluster: this can then also feed into the regional Alliance e-newsletter – Roadmap to Equality.
• Run an aggressive media campaign in each country – where we try and get the same message across in terms of Article 28.
• Make better use of social media to build a regional gender, peace and security movement.
• Put together a database of the women and men who attended the formation of the national Gender Peace Security cluster meetings.