Round two of the Gender Research Fellowship Programme takes off in Nairobi

Building on a successful first phase, the Gender Research Fellowship Programme is back for round two.

This unique programme has been designed to strengthen the capacity of researchers and partners working within the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP-FTA) to conduct research that can support gender equality and other desired project outcomes, such as the sustainable management and conservation of tree genetic resources. 

The programme’s specific objectives are to:  

• Strengthen the knowledge base regarding gender and the sustainable management and delivery of tree genetic resources,
• Build CRP-FTA staff and partner skills in gender analysis and methodologies that support gender-transformative research,
• Develop a community of practice around engaged gender research.

From 28 August to 1 September 2017, the new Gender Fellows came together in Nairobi, Kenya, to launch the second edition of the Gender Research Fellowship Programme. The four Fellows—two women scientists from Kenya and two from Burkina Faso—developed their plans to conduct research on gender and restoration in West and East African countries. 

Three days of the inception workshop were open to other CRP-FTA participants who wished to learn approaches to move ‘Beyond gender-disaggregated data: Towards engaged research to exert change’, as the title of the workshop indicated. The other two days were reserved for the Gender Fellows to discuss – despite language barriers – how to work together to implement some of those ‘engaged research’ approaches in their respective projects.

Over the coming year and a half, the Fellows will share their experiences using different approaches for social and gender analysis. They will test the usefulness of scalable, participatory and mixed method approaches to promote gender equity and sustainable natural resource management. The Fellows will be tasked with producing blogs, reports and scientific papers based on their research. These will be posted on the CRP-FTA ‘Forests, trees and agroforestry’ website so stay tuned! 

To learn more about the launch of the second phase of the Gender Fellowship, discover the presentation delivered at the workshop by Markus Ihalainen on Intersectionality.

The Gender Research Fellowship Programme is funded by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry and is coordinated by Bioversity International and ICRAF. Partner institutes actively involved in the Gender Research Fellowship Programme include Association tipaalga, Centre National de Semences Forestières (CNSF - Burkina Faso), Feed the Children, Kenya Agricultural & Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), and Université de Ouagadougou.

Photo 1: The workshop participants in Nairobi, Kenya. Credit: ICRAF/C.Magaju; 

Photo 2: The four gender fellows. Credit: Bioversity International/M.Elias