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Addressing Gender Based Discriminatory Social Beliefs and Practices
Compendium of Good Practices
The compendium of good practices is realized in the framework of the
comprehensive project “Dynamics of beliefs, discriminatory social practices and
gender equity in the MENA region: Lessons learned during the last twenty
years". The compendium of good practices including 16 practices for
addressing the discrimination that violates the human rights of women and
children such as the right to own and use one’s body, security, dignity,
health, reproductive health, education, communication, information access, and
economic and political participation… The project has produced a specialized
website and a paper intended for decision-makers.
Since this publication deals with the lessons learned from initiatives, programmes, activities and research that treated or intend to treat discriminatory practices, the project preparation process has enabled us, as a an active party in combating discrimination against women, to draw the following lessons:
* The need for harmonising the definitions relating to best practices/good practices, establishing a consensus on them, and training the various actors on them.
* The need for experience documenting and adopting it as one of the monitoring/evaluation mechanisms, which requires laying the foundations of documentation and the related training…
* Absence of attention to institutional memory, which can represent, at the experience level, a knowledge reference on the adopted approaches and the mechanisms for overcoming challenges and evaluation/monitoring.
The initiatives included in this publication emphasize:
* The importance of socio-cultural contexts in designing any type of initiative or field intervention. For such reason, what may appear a simple action in these experiences is an achievement in the full sense of the word in a given socio-cultural context.
* The importance of innovative approaches in designing strategies. Albeit important, ‘hackneyed’ approaches are not productive today.
* The importance of the participatory approach to ensure initiative sustainability.
* The importance of raising the awareness of donors about the need to support time consuming initiatives and provide more funds to address discriminatory practices, instead of allocating insufficient budgets for limited periods of time.