
Introduction
Women and law in southern Africa convened a meeting on the need to generate consensus on the contribution towards the 2017 SADC regional Barometer. As an alliance lead in Zambia Women and Law in southern Africa saw the need to ensure we take and active in mobilizing both civil society and government departments to be part of the meeting so that the meetings can generate both discussion an increase consensus on the issues that were to be discussed in the meeting . The meeting drew participants mainly the key players in the ministry of Gender as key participants to drive the process and the deliberations in the meeting.
Protocol Analysis
With guidance from the local government, Association of Zambia the meeting proceeded to look at the specific provisions and how Zambia as a country had faired on each of the provisions under discussion. The ministry of Gender provided direction that it was very important to ensure that the proceedings also take into account the key millstones that the government of Zambia had put in place especially in the constitutional review process where a number of equality clauses had been taken into account to ensure that we move strides in ranking , civil society organizations felt that there was need to be factual and accurate in all the deliberations in order to provide more accurate and up to date information on the situation in the country . A debate ensued on the need to look at whether we should include a number of strides that were reported on in the previous year. It was agreed that it was important to focus on the new issues or new areas of improvement that have since been looked at in the current year unless any additional issues were added on to the matters reported on the previous year.
Proceedings
The involvement of the ministry of Gender was key to the process in that, there was consensus generated from the onset when the deliberations were being discussed, government and civil society had to agree on specific issues especially on the actual ratings and where we felt as a country we should place ourselves, it was difficult in that government was seeing the ranking process from their perspective while civil society was also seeing themselves from their own perspective as well.
The process was very good as it was able to provide on the spot measure in terms of how we have fared as a country, where we have made achievement and how as a country we were able to record the notable successes and why we were not able to make some strides in other interventions.