The key component of Women’s Voice and Leadership – Pakistan (WVL-P) is to facilitate its core partner Women Right Organizations (WROs) to introduce women transformative leadership actions within their organizations while building on gender just values, practices, and principles, for their improved management, programming, and sustainability. The process aims to engage potential women leaders in these core WROs partners and nurture their leadership skills following feminist principles and assess its impact on transforming organizational programs and processes. Therefore, Oxfam used its prior tested model of Gender Leadership Program (GLP) exercised with Oxfam staff to replicate with other women right organizations. WVL-P therefore aims to adopt GLP approach, guidance and training kit (comprising module and other training materials) for identified women leaders from 12 WVL-P partners.
The GLP is a foundational member of the Oxfam extended family of leadership capacity-building initiatives. It shares its DNA with all the older and emerging programs, such as the Management and Leadership Program (MLP), the Campaigns and Advocacy Leadership Program (CALP), the Transformational Leadership Journey (TLJ), the Program Leadership Journey (PLJ), the Developing Leaders Program (DLP), the so-called ‘mini-GLP’, the ‘longer form’ GLPs, and the OGB Leadership Pathway.
The GLP shares the purpose and commitment within Oxfam, to address the dysfunctional aspects of the ‘deep culture’ within the organisation, and to bring about substantive and radical change at all levels. We realize that there is no ‘magic bullet’ that will turn the culture around; change has to take place at the personal, collective and institutional levels, and it takes not only time and sustained commitment, but an effort that has both scale and coherence.
Training staff to change attitudes and behaviour is only one part of the picture. It will only have any impact if the organisation also puts in place the regulatory architecture to root out and prevent exploitation and abuse by staff members. Staff who have been through a GLP course to bring about change for gender equality will find their efforts falling on barren ground if measures are not put in place by WVL-P to ensure that their managers and colleagues understand, value, support and learn from their initiatives for change.
In the 8 years of its existence, since 2010, the GLP has taken a range of different forms. The ‘long-form’ GLPs were conceived as an ‘individual and collective learning journey’ for mid-level managers and coordinators to provide a better understanding and appreciation of basic Gender Justice concepts; to build awareness, confidence and motivation to put women’s rights at the centre of Oxfam’s work; and to inspire and build their capacity to exercise leadership from a gender justice and women’s rights perspective. Oxfam’s training manual on Gender Leadership in Humanitarian Action (2017) also drew on the GLP, as well as on Oxfam’s recently adopted transformative feminist leadership model, and has been trialled in four countries.
The GLP content was refined, renewed and adaptations were built into the course as valuable material for facilitators to inform its future iterations and keep the ‘living laboratory’ flexible, relevant, and nurtured.
In order to ensure the core thrust of enhancing the women leadership within the WROs, WVL-P contextualized the rich content available under the GLP for roll out in Pakistan. The refinement of the content was done to ensure personal, collective, and institutional gender just organizations, while providing an opportunity to the project to identify potential women leaders as change agents. Under the project, GLP was not only launched with these potential women leaders but its impact on their self-transformation as well as their work within their organizations was also regularly assessed. These women were selected during roll-out of Capacity Assessment Tool for Gender Just Organizations (CAT4GJO) and belong to a diverse group of families, geographical regions and management hierarchies. Some of these women belong to the governance bodies as well as program management structures and have long lasting association with the WROs.
To date, WVL-P has successfully contributed to the cadre of gender transformative leadership through rolling out 03 training modules under the GLP program. For more information on our GLPiers and to witness their journey of transformation and overall contributions, please click on the below link:
