The objective of ‘Guidelines on Gender Mainstreaming and a Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA)’ is to provide a concise and compact guide for FAO REU / SEC staff to use at different stages of the project cycle. By bringing together the key elements of gender mainstreaming and HRBA found within the different guidelines, handbooks, tool kits and other documents used by FAO and the UN system as a whole , and by compiling their essential points into a user-friendly format, this publication directly aims to ease the process of observing and successfully incorporating these crosscutting themes into all levels of the project cycle (design, implementation, conclusion, monitoring and evaluation), and into all activities and documents of the respective projects.