Dear good people,
You will notice that my responses are not arranged in the order of the questions because some of them respond to more that one question.
1. Approaches that speak to the man's wisdom should be encouraged. Men and women should be exposed to approaches or methodologies that bring out self-reflecting on their actions which emotionally injure the other. The understanding gained can help the men and women make judgement for themselves. When people are reminded of their wrong doings they tend to be defensive citing culture, religious beliefs and other factors as backing for their actions.
2. Promote approaches that are easy to understand and interpret but they bring out evidence of gender imbalances and injustices without any provocation. Tools used in gender action learning system (GALS) are the best example known for peacefully giving visual evidence of gender imbalances.
3. All approaches that help men and women to see the value, love and respect of one another will win the battle. The approaches whose principle is guided by coercion and fear motivation only work in the short run but leave more serious gender gaps thereafter.
4. Best are the approaches that strengthen family ties. Targeting people as couples could be costly but the change achieved is ever self sustaining. Targeting one spouce per household is only good for satisfying quantitative indicators while compromising quality of the desired impact.
5. More behavioural research needs to be done in order to understand changes in people's behaviours as they respond to issues around them. With technology advancement, political instability, climate change, diseases and many other situations, humans change their behaviours and locations in order to survive the harsh situations sometimes in ways that increase societal gender gaps.
6. Most policies especially in least developed countries are carefully drafted sorely to attract donor funding. However, the actual policy implementation suffers serious underperformances, often times deliberately.
7. Rampant corruption tendencies especially in African countries mostly affect budgetlines that support gender interventions. Governments make realocations moving funds from gender budgetlines to fund the critical ones such as health and direct food support.
8. Men and boys have not adequately been involved in the drive to reduce gender gaps to the extent that the term 'gender' is grossly mistaken to mean women. The world needs men that can interpret existing gender gaps and effectively influence fellow men to change. Men who promote gender equality and advocate for fairness and impartiality need to understand that it is their passion and dedication to facilitate change will help them succeed otherwise society will regard them as weak minded.
Sr. Amon Chinyophiro