Applying Gender Lens to Science, Technology & Innovation | Buni Hybrid Workshop

A blogpost of Patience A. Karua , Buni Hub

Have you ever thought of how gender lens can bootstrap the ecosystem? Have you ever thought about how gender lens can make a good change in the world? This article will highlight the challenges and what to be done to embrace and equalize the gender lens.

Gender lens has gained greater attention within national and international agendas! This attention will sustainably create the significant potential to meet the development goals and improve women's and men's lives worldwide. The workshop brought together important representatives from various fields in Tanzania's ecosystem. The focus was on promoting gender equality to ensure that both men and women benefit from development opportunities. The main topic of discussion was policies, which are currently a significant challenge. It was highlighted that the existing policies do not encourage a gender lens that enables women and men equal access to opportunities and benefits in critical sectors such as agriculture, water, energy, and transport. The aim is to promote and leverage the potential of women and men in these sectors.

Unlocking Gender Lens opportunities in STEM | Dr. Flora Tibazarwa, University of Dar es Salaam

To ensure that technologies are gender-responsive, it is essential to clearly indicate their gender responsiveness and present gender-related information in the prioritized list. The responsive has to ensure gender-sensitive stakeholder engagement during decision-making and consider the gender analysis conducted to inform the final decision. Scaling gender is essential, and policies should encourage and enable women to participate in STEM studies and opportunities. Also, the ecosystem should be accountable for the type of technology introduced and consider its implications for society. All measures should be taken to help women participate and contribute to technology. Suppose policies encourage women's participation in different working groups. In that case, most likely, she will promote the involvement of other women in the team.?

Gender and innovation in Tanzania | Diana Niinsima, DOT Tanzania?

The innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem has contributed several positive elements that promote women's participation, such as high mobile usage, which enables women to navigate, grow, and start successful businesses. This also helps women to identify their talents in entrepreneurship, allowing them to create their own companies. Additionally, several programs provide entrepreneurship training, which allows women to realize their abilities and potential in this field. Gender and public-private opportunities, policy dialogue, and forums are still a constraint, as 90% of participants of most conferences about business, technology, and innovations are male. With that, women rarely raise their voices when attending or grabbing those opportunities. Women in entrepreneurship in Tanzania face various challenges, including access to land, knowledge, and skills in business, business formalization, and ownership, decision-making stigma, corruption, sextortion in the tender application, access to technology and digital skills, etc., more challenges. Addressing the gender gap requires concentrated action, including establishing a support system to engender policy frameworks, applying international gender lenses, creating training environments, enhancing networking capacity, expanding markets for different categories of women, and many more measures.

Gender Lens Opportunities from Financial Institutions and how to unlock them for Business Financial Sustainability | Jacklina Jackson, CRDB Bank

Financial Institutions have various opportunities for women and men to access financial support. Financial institutions have been working on encouraging the participation of women in accessing financial support for their businesses, and this is because a high percentage that grab the opportunities is male. They offer different opportunities that can allow women and men to create businesses such as: Agent networks and other savings and investments such as broker services, Shares access, leadership programs, revolving grants. Investing in gender lens is essential, and there should be a gender intelligence value proposition that will promote and support gender groups to access the opportunities that will create a better lives version of the beneficiaries.

Testimonial:

This was very eye opening! Now I need to familiarize myself more with this field.

Carolyne Musiba

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