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Reducing Barriers to Women's Economic Empowerment in El Salvador and Honduras Gender, Conflict, and Power Dynamics Training: Lessons Learned

The Reducing Barriers to Women's Economic Empowerment in El Salvador and Honduras Initiative (RBI), under the leadership of Grameen Foundation USA, is the first initiative under the Women and Girls Empowered (WAGE) program whose goal is to advance the status of women by reducing barriers that female entrepreneurs face in accessing finance and growing their businesses. The Gender, Conflict and Power Dynamics (GCPD) workshop was one among several capacity building interventions designed to support private sector actors in mainstreaming gender. GCPD uses a gender-transformative, participatory methodology to engage participants in a variety of interactive activities to stimulate critical reflection and analysis regarding conflict, unconscious bias, power dynamics and gender and to enable the articulation of proposals for change at the personal and organizational levels. As part of the workshop, a pre- and post-test survey was conducted to measure short-term changes in knowledge and attitudes. Approximately 6 months to one year after the completion of each partner’s GCPD workshop, a third-party qualitative assessment was completed to understand whether the GPCD workshop was effective at sensitizing implementers to issues of do no harm/safeguarding and diversity and inclusion, and at identifying areas of change and action for future programming. The assessments show that the GCPD workshop resulted in short-term knowledge and attitude change. This report goes into further details regarding the results of the assessments.