FACILITATING DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS Mahlet Hailemariam (Gender at Work)
I am an associate member of Gender at Work based in Ethiopia. I am one of the team facilitating the School Related Gender Based Violence (SRGBV) action learning process initiated by Education International and UNGEI in Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya. My role was to facilitate the gender action learning processes and to mentor the change teams in their initiatives to address SRGBV. The mentoring process included following up progress and providing technical support to the change teams as needed. During one mentoring session, I was sitting in a small, dark and congested conference room with the change team, administration and program members. All of them knew each other very well. I was the only outsider. There were three men among the participants. I saw one of the men sitting at the edge of the chair. He looked as if he was getting ready to quickly leave the room. A second man was reading from a magazine in front of him, while the third stood in a corner of the room pretending to read from a poster on the wall. I guessed that they were feeling out of place and wondered why. The female participants, oblivious of their surroundings, were chatting and laughing. After a brief welcome and introduction, we started by revising what had happened in the previous action learning sessions. A female participant, from the administration department, asked a question. “I wanted to learn more about what SRGBV is? I want to understand how I can identify SRGBV?� Based on her question and recognizing that not everyone in the room had participated in previous trainings, we started our discussion.
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