Follow-up on the National Workshop on Gender ... - ENERGIA Africa

2. Introduction
BOTEC, the national focal point for ENERGIA in Botswana, conducted a return workshop
on 18 May 2011 at BOTEC in Gaborone, eight months after the national training. The
purpose of the return workshop was to discuss achievements and challenges with
regard to implementation of the gender action plans (GAPs) developed at the training in
September 2010. The follow <strong>up</strong> workshop was attended by 16 participants including
facilitators (7 females and 9 males). Only six participants (3 females and 3 males)
represented the stakeholder organizations that prepared the GAPs, i.e. BOTEC, Rural
RIPCO (B), EECG Consultants, UB. The additional participants that make <strong>up</strong> the total
(16) were members of GENBO who were scheduled to meet on the same day to prepare
a Strategy for the Network. Most of these were the newly recruited members of the
Gender and Energy Network of Botswana (GENBO) who were to invited to participate
and give feedback when the GAPs were presented. This was intended to introduce the
members to some of the ideas on gender mainstreaming that GENBO promotes and to
gain insight into some of the energy programmes in Botswana.
Almost all of the participating institutions have planned, or have ongoing energy
projects in which they had prepared plans to mainstream gender using some of the
tools, ideas and skills acquired from the September, 2010 gender mainstreaming
training workshop. Some of the participants who attended the first main workshop
could not attend the follow <strong>up</strong> workshop due to their other institutional commitments.
However, close to full representation of all the stakeholder organisations was achieved.
This effectively facilitated achievement of the workshop objectives which are outlined
below.
Workshop objectives
� To follow <strong>up</strong> on action plan implementation and evaluate progress made since
the last workshop.
� To continue to strengthen capacity of the institutional representatives who
participated in the gender mainstreaming trainings. The representatives are
now projects developers, managers and leaders in gender mainstreaming into
the various energy projects of their organizations.
� To assess and share experiences and challenges with regard to the overall
institutional environment for gender mainstreaming in energy in Botswana.
Workshop expectations
The participants’ expectations were as follows:
� To share and learn from each others’ experiences on gender mainstreaming and
implementation of the GAPs.
� Reflect on the aspects of the GAPs which presented problems for implementation
and to discuss possible solutions to those challenges.
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