Back to Index

Gender Support Programme - 2012 Call for Proposals
UN Women
February 2012

Deadline: Extended to 1200 noon Thursday 1 March 2012

Download related documents:
- Call for Proposals - Acrobat PDF version - (213KB)
- Frequently Asked Questions - Acrobat PDF version - (17.4KB)
- Guidelines - MS Word version - (773KB)

If you do not have the free Acrobat reader on your computer, download it from the Adobe website by clicking here.

UN WOMEN is the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. It is widely accepted that ensuring gender equality and women's empowerment is critical to achieving a wide range of development objectives including the Millennium Development Goals. UN Women works with governments and civil society to design laws, policies, programmes and services needed to implement global standards for achieving gender equality by focusing on priority areas that are fundamental to women's equality, and that can unlock progress across the board. In this regard, UN WOMEN is pleased to announce the 2012 call for proposals for the Gender Support Programme (GSP). GSP is a multi-donor initiative dedicated to the advancement of gender equality, equity and women's empowerment in Zimbabwe at local and national levels. GSP is currently funded by the European Commission (EC), The British Department for International Development (DFID) and the Royal Danish Embassy.

Grants from the Gender Support Programme are highly competitive. The Fund will prioritize innovative, impact-oriented programmes that exhibit joint initiatives involving multi- stakeholder groups, implementing national policies and priorities and fostering collaborations and partnerships between government departments, network organizations, well established women's organizations and community based organizations from around Zimbabwe.
The key areas of interventions are guided by the thematic areas contained in the National Gender and Women's Empowerment Strategic Action Plan (NGWESAP) and areas prioritized by stakeholders at a consultative meeting held in November 2011 in Harare and outcomes of the National GBV conference held in December 2011 in Harare. The thematic areas for this call for proposals and the focus areas are;

Thematic Area 1: Ending Gender Based Violence

The past decade has seen a significant increase in reported cases of gender based violence, despite the adoption of policies, laws, and action plans to address gender based violence. Statistically women and girls suffer the most forms of violence; thousands remain at risk without protection and limited access to critical services, or opportunities to seek justice. In order to address serious gaps in the realization of national and international commitments to end violence against women and girls, this call seeks to decrease the gap between policy and implementation by expanding the quality and quantity of support available for the implementation of the Domestic Violence Act and the National Plan of Action and effective programmes to end Gender Based Violence (GBV) such as support to the National 4P Campaign on Zero Tolerance of (GBV). Areas of intervention seek:

1. Increasing the number and quality of legal aid services for GBV survivors
2. Strengthening the capacity of organizations providing legal aid, paralegal outreach schemes.
3. Strengthening the capacity of institutional responses to improve survivors access to health services, protection and access to justice for women and girls.
4. Supporting capacity development of community leaders, chiefs, men and boys towards change in attitudes and to have a better understanding of VAW and its implications.
5. Capacity building and awareness in resolving conflict and building peace.

Thematic Area 2: Women's leadership and participation in politics and decision-making

Women's political participation is a fundamental prerequisite for gender equality and genuine democracy. It facilitates women's direct engagement in public decision-making and is a means of ensuring better accountability to women. Political accountability to women begins with increasing the number of women in decision-making positions, but it cannot stop there. What is required are gender-sensitive governance reforms that will make all elected officials more effective at promoting gender equality in public policy and ensuring their implementation. The current constitution making process provides an opportunity for ensuring gender parity is achieved for women to assume positions in decision-making and leadership. Areas of intervention seek to:

1. Enhance leadership, participation and representation of women at all levels of decision-making through capacity strengthening of women and women's groups to advocate and lobby for gender specific principles, clauses, including special measures for women.
2. Facilitate the effective participation of women and gender advocates in national processes such as the Constitution making process, referendum and elections.
3. Support gender equality advocates to influence law reform in compliance with the new constitutional framework.
4. Strengthen the capacity of gender equality advocates and their organisations to influence and implement the national gender policy and strategy, regional instruments and frameworks such as CEDAW concluding observations and the SADC Gender Protocol.

To find out more download all documents

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP