UN Women leads training to strengthen gender mainstreaming capacity within United Nations System teams in the Caribbean
A recent refresher gender training series for UN Caribbean staff addressed key gaps in gender mainstreaming, including uneven progress across programmes and the need for stronger gender-sensitive data to guide decision-making. Experts from UN Women Americas and the Caribbean Regional Office and MCO-Caribbean delivered the refresher sessions for system colleagues and partners across 6 UN Country Teams.
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Isiuwa Iyahen, Head of Office a.i. and Deputy Representative of the UN Women MultiCountry Office for the Caribbean, noted that the training enhanced the integration of gender equality principles into the next UN MultiCountry Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework. UN colleagues from the UN Environment Programme and the Resident Coordinator’s office in Jamaica also shared case study examples of applying gender to the design of the transport system and economic analysis of AI readiness and employment.
Gender mainstreaming requires assessing how planned actions—policies, legislation, and programmes—affect women and men at all levels. It ensures gender considerations are embedded across research, advocacy, planning, and implementation.
Although some participants were already familiar with these concepts, they valued the opportunity to build further their capacity to integrate gender perspectives throughout programme and project cycles, including design, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and reporting.
The training reinforced the UN’s gender mainstreaming commitments, which draw on agency gender strategies, national gender action plans, the UN Country Team Gender System-wide Action Plan (SWAP), and UN Women’s guidance on gender mainstreaming (Gender mainstreaming: A global strategy for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls) grounded in global frameworks such as CEDAW and the Belem do Para Convention.
Participants identified persistent barriers—limited sex-disaggregated data, resource constraints, and institutional and cultural challenges—as ongoing obstacles to effective gender integration.
Despite these issues, they expressed renewed commitment to applying improved gender analysis skills and to valuing the practical case studies presented.
“I will continue promoting gender integration in project design in my role as gender focal point for the Caribbean. [I will] ensure every new project proposal has at least one gender-sensitive outcome/output. We will also adjust our M&E tools to track gender equality more explicitly using indicators disaggregated by sex, age, and diversity”, Iyahen concluded.
By Sharon Carter-Burke, Communications and Advocacy, UN Women Multi-Country Office Caribbean