BLaguerre

There Is Nothing Wrong With Feeding your loved ones.

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:14:38 -0700

There’s nothing wrong with feeding someone you love. Eating, cooking, and sharing a meal can be an expression of culture, tenderness, and love. But what if you decide not to cook? What if you’re tired? What if you want to rest, read, work, sleep, or simply not be responsible for making dinner that day? Would you still be loved? Will you still be respected? Would you still be considered a good wife, good husband, partner, mother, father or daughter-in-law? Or do you cook at all?

From the gender analyses I have led, supported, or reviewed and the programs I have implemented with small or large teams, they also confirmed that women are responsible for household chores, including cooking. This is old story. Women cook, serve, and feed the entire household, including children, husbands, and other male relatives, such as grandfathers. While cooking, women consider which ingredients are missing from the kitchen and plan the next meal before clearing away the current one. Sometimes they cook, but they are not responsible for going to the market. Even if they do go, they do not make any financial decisions. This dynamic varies depending on community, age, class, religion, tribe, country, etc. In some cases, such as with professional women, they have access to financial opportunities and can plan meals. However, most of them still have to cook because of their gender.

In my last essay, I wrote about...Read More

Don’t Take Your Glass of Water for Granted

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:12:45 -0700

We all drink water. It's the one thing everyone on Earth has in common. We drink it dozens of times a day without thinking, alongside everything else we do. We also know it matters. The common advice is to drink about eight glasses, or roughly two liters, a day. Most of us have heard this recommendation. But few of us ever count.

On my field days, I'm usually the one who forgets. I get caught up in gender analyses, community sessions, and interviews that run long. The hours pass before I notice my own thirst. When I do remember, the solution is simple. There is a bottle in my bag. I order one with lunch. I buy one from a stall near the venue. The water is always within reach. Getting it costs me a few seconds and a small amount of money, and then I forget about it again.

This ease changes the way I see the world. It creates an illusion. When water is always available, you start to assume that it is always available to everyone. You picture the woman in the village reaching for her bottle the same way you reach for yours. She isn't.

One in four, and that is last year

In 2024, 2.1 billion people still lackeRead More

''Looking at you, Looking at me''

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:48:18 -0700

I was standing in line at passport control. After a long flight, I was tired. I wished for someone to take my passport, stamp it, and teleport me to a bed so I could sleep. It was a simple thought, but it felt heavy because my brain and body were ready for a nap. It was nothing special, just moving from the line to a bed to rest. But who would undergo the biometric checks so that immigration could register me? I should be there anyway.

If you’ve ever taken a flight longer than eight hours, I suspect you’ve had this thought, too. It’s the most ordinary yet impossible wish. There was no one at the front of the line with open palms, ready to receive what I couldn’t hold. That’s the part the fantasy leaves out. If someone took it, then someone else would have to hold it. But not all weight should be carried alone. Nor should the gender equality achievement.

When Gender Work Becomes Someone Else’s Job

I have carried that same wish into rooms far from any airport. During meetings and workshops, and in the long, quiet moments after a report is filed, I have wished that someone would take the burden of gender equality off my shoulders and carry it out the door. Gender advisors and other passionate practitioners may want to lead the process, but they should not have to bear the entire burden alone. One reason for this is that we misunderstand what gender equality is. It is not the mission of any single entity. Rather, it is a lens through which we examine systems and how they affect us all. It is about our choices, our living conditions, and who gets left behind. It is exhausting when practitioners must set expectations, conduct endless training, and advocate for women, girls, and marginalized groups. Gender...Read More

The Chair You Sit In Decides What You Can See

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:20:47 -0700

If you have ever sat through gender training before, it was probably just a lecture. Maybe you didn’t call it that. You felt it. I know because I have been the one at the front of the room.

Have you ever participated in a gender training?

Yes, I did.

I have led countless workshops, trainings, and capacity-building sessions. I’ve facilitated discussions and watched people nod. I have done this with local government officials, NGO staff, farmers, community leaders, men, women, and adolescents, you name it.

I have also consulted on other gender trainings and participated in some of them myself. One pattern I have noticed in many gender training sessions is that men, who had never been asked for their thoughts on gender, were paired with women who had been asked so many times that they knew the expected answer. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I started to see something the training manuals did not address, perspective.

The work was incomplete without it. More sessions or better slides are not the solution. It’s important to talk about perspective before a gender training. Without it, the frame you’re using will leave the most important questions unasked questions about who’s in the room, what they already know, what they’ve lived through, and what they’ve never been asked to contribute to the conversation. Until we started asking these questions, we were not going to achieve the results we promised to donors, communities, and ourselves.

Is perspective that important? Yes, we need to start with our own perspective as well as that of gender advisors.

What? Perspectives? Yes

A tomato is never just a tomato

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:09:18 -0700

I do not like tomatoes. I eat them anyway because I love what they do to my body. A mirror is the same kind of object. You may not like what it shows you, but you look anyway.

My Kenyan friend tells me tomato and onion are the base of any soup here. Anything with tomato and onion, she says, is enough to taste good. I argue with her. I am Caribbean. In my kitchen the base is “Epis”. Garlic, scallion, parsley, thyme, hot pepper, sometimes bell pepper, you name it, ground together before anything else touches the pot. Tomato is a guest in “epis”. Not a host.

My West African friend would not even let us finish the argument. She would walk in with five more ingredients and laugh at both of us.

So we disagree. And yet whether the tomato is the base of the broth, a guest in the epis, or one note in a five-ingredient harmony, the tomato is in the pot. We are eating it.

That is the first thing to notice about tomatoes. They are everywhere. In African kitchens, in Caribbean kitchens, in the meals of people who like them and people who do not. They are one of the most universal ingredients in our food systems and one of the most quietly political.

Following the tomato

If you want to understand food systems, follow a tomato from the field to the plate. The whole story is there.

Move down the chain. Aggregators arrive at the farmgate. They are mostly men. They have the capital to buy in bulk, the trucks to transport, and the...Read More

The Books That Held Me in 2025

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 08:15:37 -0800

2025 was a year of stopping, questioning, letting things end, and finding the courage to stay still when I did not know what was next. Some books I read, I needed something to hold onto while I stayed inside the uncertainty. These books did not fix anything for me. They did not give me answers or tell me what to do next. They stayed with me.

Each book came at a moment when I needed it. One helped me think more clearly about the kind of support I actually needed. Another helped me stay grateful during a time when I was out of work and unsure where things were heading. Others reminded me of who I am, how I speak, and what I feel when things are unclear.

What they all had in common is this. They helped me keep moving without leaving myself behind. And sometimes, that is enough.

The First 90 Days

One of the most important lessons I took from The First 90 Days is that support is not generic. You cannot ask for the same kind of support in every season of your...Read More

Not Vulnerable, Key Actor!

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 10:36:25 -0700

In the highlands of Ethiopia, as rains fail and rivers dry, it is women who wake first, walking miles for water, foraging for food from withered fields, calming hungry children while negotiating with a silent land. In Mauritania's desert villages, it is women who gather the seeds, store the knowledge, and manage the rhythm of life amid creeping sands. And in Haiti, when hurricanes rip apart homes and political violence restricts aid access, it is women who step forward, organizing, adapting, and surviving. Insecurity, violence, and any form of instability worsen their lifestyle. The process of living becomes unbearable. Yet, they are still missing from most tables where climate adaptation policies are designed.

Women in low-We’ve learned how to do gender analysis. What we haven’t learned is how to be changed by it

We’ve learned how to do gender analysis. What we haven’t learned is how to be changed by it

I’ve sat with adolescent girls in Camp Perrin, Haiti, where safety is negotiated daily and silence is taught early. I’ve listened to women market leaders in Kasai, DRC, who described how selling vegetables offers more than just income, it also provides a public presence and a sense of protection. I’ve stood among pastoralist women in northern Kenya, whose livelihoods stretch between drought and displacement, and whose knowledge systems are deeply attuned to survival in harsh, overlooked terrains. Each of these spaces offered lessons no report template could capture.

They reminded me that gender analysis is not a formality.
It is not a paragraph, a toolkit, or a compliance requirement.
It is a lens to decode power.
And when done with honesty and courage, it surfaces what most systems work hard to ignore.

We don’t just conduct gender analysis to satisfy donor checklists or institutional templates. We conduct it to understand where the burden of dysfunction truly lands. And more often than not, that burden is being carried by women and girls whose efforts are invisible, unacknowledged, and structurally unsupported.

Ten years was never the goal. Integrity was.

June 2025 would have marked ten years with Mercy Corps. I left just shy of that milestone, not of my mission. The number was never the point. The depth, the conviction, the clarity I carried out the door, that is what remains intact.

For nearly a decade, I showed up. Not for a job title. Not to complete a project cycle. For something more personal and more enduring: for purpose, for transformation, for systems that needed reimagining, and for people who deserved to be seen in their full humanity. And for a belief I have never been able to set down, that equity is not an accessory to development. It is the foundation.

This work has never been about adding gender to a checklist. For me, gender equity is the lens through which I design, lead, and deliver. It is the ethical ground I stand on. The compass. The standard by which I measure integrity, in systems, in institutions, in leadership.

Where I stood. Who I stood with.

I have had the privilege of working across some of the most complex and courageous contexts in the world. And in each one, the same truth held: the fight for equity is not theoretical. It is lived, daily, by real people in real bodies navigating real danger.

Women facing violence just to reach a health centre. Girls walking past armed men to get to school. Adolescent girls denied the space to speak about their own bodies and futures. Thousands of displaced women surviving trauma with little to no care, and little to no recognition. And across all of it, women organising, leading, rebuilding. Often without anyone writing it down.

These are not isolated stories. They are connected by a thread of injustice that runs across borders. And by the quiet, determined...Read More

October 11, International day of the Girl

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 10:59:47 -0700

Every girl in this world deserves to live a healthy life and have full autonomy over her body. Every girl deserves access to education, the right to dream of a bright future, and the ability to grow up in safety and security.

No girl should experience violence, forced marriage, or societal pressure that limits her choices.

I dream of a world—soon—where every girl is alive, full of energy, free, and fearless in pursuing her ambitions. A world where girls are free from harassment and stereotypes, where their personalities, choices, and paths are fully respected.

In my current work in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I am honored to lead an approach that empowers more than 5,000 girls through safe spaces with Mercy Corps. I couldn’t be prouder! We still have a long way to go, but I believe that even the smallest action can create a ripple effect of change.

What about you?
What has been your experience working with girls?
What do you envision for the girls in your community?
Can you take action today? Absolutely!

Let’s stand together for girls’ empowerment. I proudly support initiatives championing girls' rights and opportunities, including Mercy Corps, BeGirl, Girl Rising, Girls Not Brides, and many more.

💜 Happy day to all the girls around the world. Let’s keep pushing for a future where every girl thrives!