partners

The project aimed to address the under representation of women in decision making positions in Jamaica, particularly on the boards of private companies and public commissions. The project did this by: increasing the participation of women through training and awareness building and increasing the participation of women in leadership in community based organizations, including school boards, also through training and awareness building. It also sought to create a national conversation on the need to open spaces for women to participate in decision making. There was also a separate women’s leadership research activity undertaken in Trinidad and Tobago. Although women comprise more than 70% of university graduates in Jamaica, only 13% of parliamentarians are women and only 16% of the board positions in the private sector are filled by women. The project believed that by training 100 women it could make a strategic infusion of talented and enthusiastic women into the boardrooms, and transform their gender dynamics. The project met its main objective of increasing the number of qualified women trained and available for service on public commissions and private sector boards. Some of these women were already high profile leaders and board members, but most were entry and mid-professional women with leadership potential that still remained to be tapped.

The project was designed to engage young people from marginalized populations in four regions of Thailand, to empower them to voice their needs, access their rights, participate in political processes, and improve their lives and communities. The grantee set out to create new leaders among young people to lead actions in the disenfranchised communities. While the project supported the implementing partners financially and to a lesser extent with expertise, it did not demonstrate significant added-value in the area of democratic development. The trainees were by and large already engaged in development work in their communities and, once the project ended, the partners and the young people continued as before. The project designers would have been more aware of this, and potentially had a chance to rethink the relevance of the design, if they had reviewed existing and earlier practice in this area, and had considered in more depth the way NGOs in the regions work and from where they get their funding. The project fell into the trap of becoming, essentially, a short-term provider of funds.

The project aimed to expand the awareness of and ability of indigenous groups to use international human rights standards and mechanisms. The project particularly targeted skilled community leaders who could replicate the training courses. Ultimately the grantee sought to build the indigenous peoples’ ability to participate and organize themselves so that they could challenge discrimination and oppression. The training of trainers succeeded in empowering community leaders and increasing their knowledge of international instruments for the defense of their rights, of which they were previously unaware. Methodological and pedagogical support for disseminating human rights knowledge in indigenous communities was, however, not provided and there is no evidence of any analysis being made of the results and lessons learned during the training, which would contributed to the sustainability of the project and the future usefulness of the training documents.