relationships

Clear communication with project stakeholders is essential to foster effective collaboration and mitigate potential misunderstandings or disputes. This should include a clear description of their roles and responsibilities, benefits, and timelines. In this project, discrepancies in the beneficiary selection and external consultant management would have been improved if all the stakeholders had received and signed specific Terms of Reference (ToR) outlining their duties, responsibilities, compensation, expected deliverables, and timeline.

The challenges posed by an unexpected event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, underscored the importance of fostering strong connections with project stakeholders, adaptability, and proactive engagement. In this case, faced with a lockdown and the inability to conduct planned activities, the project successfully maintained its course, sustained stakeholder engagement, and capitalized on unforeseen opportunities to achieve enhanced outcomes.

Meaningful and transformative change to safeguard rights of transgender community is possible through legislative action. Creating adequate legal frameworks and making justice work for transgender community requires rigorous policy advocacy and extensive engagement with policy and law makers. In this case, while the grantee took a number of initiatives including legal and policy review as well as development of a draft law on Transgender Rights, it met with limited success to generate ownership to steer the legal reform process due to limited engagement with parliamentarians and policy makers.

Connected, aware and empowered CSOs and Human Rights Defenders can become a strong catalyst for change at the grassroots level in order to promote local action aimed at promoting transgender persons’ rights. In this case, the engagement provided them a chance to liaise and establish a link with government officials and departments which continued beyond the project.

In-person training conducted through a series of shorter sessions over a period of several months, rather than one training condensed into a short period of time, can improve learning and support the building of connections and networks between participants, which is important to recognize and leverage.

Supplementing training through follow-up coaching and mentoring and by creating platforms for ongoing dialogue and engagement can build and sustain networks that are driven by shared understandings on key human rights and LGBTQI+ issues across the political spectrum.

Building cross-party networks of LGBTQI+ activists can ensure that key issues are retained on the agenda and more substantively engaged across the political spectrum.

Supporting a grantee to expand its geographical area of operation can enable them to create and build new networks that can increase awareness of what they do and even contribute to institutional sustainability.

Empowering women when it comes to realizing their rights, not just learning about them, requires the support of men – both in their family and in the community at-large – and they should be brought on board to champion wider societal transformation around gender.

Bringing together groups of women in places where they feel comfortable talking and discussing issues can help build longer-term momentum for a shift in attitudes, even if this is very hard to measure.