It is my proud privilege to introduce the Gender Community of Practice, which has provided a platform for the knowledge community to demonstrate deep understanding, capture tacit and experiential knowledge and make it available for the larger community of development professionals to apply for increased development effectiveness. It is a unique UN initiative in connecting people in meeting their demands for knowledge and applying it to furthering gender goals in India.

In its existence for a little more than two and half years, it has demonstrated tremendous vibrancy, meeting out demand driven initiatives from the Government of India, including the Planning Commission, various Ministries like the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Agriculture, Panchayati Raj etc. and some of the Departments dealing with sector Policies and interventions with Gender lense, the UN Agencies and the larger community of Development professionals, for taking up gender issues, discussing burning problems of women in India and taking up issues to the policy level forum.

We as Co-facilitators have supported the community with technical and administrative support in ensuring high quality outputs. In spreading the captured knowledge, we have shared the knowledge products on our website for the larger community of development professionals’ benefits. This is an extremely well organized approach to knowledge management and is an important window of the UN in knowledge servicing for the empowerment of women.   

Chandni Joshi

Regional Programme Director
South Asia Sub Regional Office
UNIFEM
New Delhi