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
The reason we do not see things in the same way is not simply due to differences in resources, language or geography, although all these factors are important. It’s about height. The chair you grew up in: your culture, history, struggles and way of making sense of the world, determines how high you sit. This determines what you can see and what remains permanently out of view.
We don't see alike.
Not even people raised in the same family. Not even people who live in the same village, work on the same farm or attend the same church. We each arrive at the table shaped by experiences that are ours alone. When you bring that reality into a gender training session, when you sit in that room as a farmer, a husband, a mother, a community leader or a man who has never been asked his opinion on any of this, you bring it all with you: Your culture. Your contradictions. Your perspective.
The participants bring all of that, too. If you do not understand their struggles beforehand, the only way forward is to preach.
The good and the bad. Where am I?
The world we kept describing in those sessions is in two boxes: Male versus female. Perpetrator versus victim. The bad side and the good side. Apparently, the goal was to get everyone to move to the “right” box. It was as if power were a simple moral failing that could be corrected with the right information. It was as if men were the problem and women were waiting to be rescued from them. The goal of gender equality was seen as achieving a cleaner box rather than creating a fundamentally different room.
We called it gender integration. Sometimes it was closer to gender preaching. Come to the good side. Believe the right things. Check the right boxes. Then, go home and somehow translate all that into a life that looks nothing like the diagram on the flip chart.
I understand why the field ended up here. The inequalities are real and serious, and sometimes you need a clear framework to build a program around. As gender advisors, we are stretched thin. We have limited budgets, small teams, and competing priorities. Sometimes, the only available resource is two days of training, enough to check the box, but not enough to effect change. We know it.
The problem arises when the framework becomes the solution. When the objective shifts from understanding people’s lives to counting how many people attended a session about those lives. When two-day training becomes the entire strategy instead of a starting point. That shift is where we lose the true meaning. Gender Advisors care, and I am serious. But we do need more attention to what we are doing.
How should we design our curriculum?
Imagine that scenario. The curriculum was written months ago in an office by people who had already decided what the participants needed to know. The objectives were set before anyone spoke to the participants. The slides were created before anyone was asked what they already knew. The facilitator arrived with a plan that did not involve the participants. This plan did not consider their perspective — their specific view of the room, the training and the facilitator standing at the front. The training assumed that the participants needed to be moved from where they were to somewhere better, and that the facilitator knew where that was.
The problem with this approach is that it is not training. It is the architecture of preaching.
This is why, even after decades of gender programming and billions spent on workshops, behavior change campaigns and community mobilization, we are still having the same conversations. We keep designing from the front of the room. We develop curricula without consulting the people they are supposed to serve. We measure attendance instead of asking if the session was worthwhile.
I remember a training session in West Africa with around thirty participants, including farmers, community organizers, local government staff, husbands who had been asked to come by their wives, and young men who had never before been asked for their opinion on gender. We were midway through a session on household decision-making. A man at the back raised his hand. He didn’t dispute the content. He said something quieter than that. He said that in his family, the eldest person made the decisions, and that the eldest person was his mother. He said that he had never understood why the training kept assuming that it was the husband who made the decisions. He wasn’t angry. He was genuinely confused.
I can confirm that the training involved a pre-training assessment. But it was not enough. The assessment focused particularly on participants’ understanding, not their problems. One thing I did was go back to the gender analysis results to help guide me. (I will be doing a whole series on gender analysis.)
The problem with designing a curriculum is failing to include people’s backgrounds and perceptions (not my own biased perspective). None of those designing the session had ever considered how decision-making worked in their own households, communities or the specific social worlds they had brought with them into that room.
What is the cost of this? The cost is trust.
When someone sits through training that ignores their knowledge and experience in order to deliver a predetermined message, they can sense it. They may nod along. They may fill out the feedback form. They may technically complete the session. But something closes within them. A door shuts that is very hard to reopen.
I have seen this happen in rooms across the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Sahel, and East Africa. It’s the moment when a participant realizes that their chair, height, vantage point, and knowledge are not part of the design. They were invited to be transformed, not consulted. Rather than asking, “What do you see from where you sit?” the program asks, “Why aren’t you sitting where we think you should be?”
That moment is when gender work loses people.
Not because the inequalities are not real. It’s not because change is unnecessary. Rather, it’s because no one wants to be told from a position of power they were never invited to occupy that their perspective is the problem.
Thinkers like Patricia Hill Collins, Sandra Harding, and African feminist scholars such as Amina Mama and Sylvia Tamale have spent decades making this argument. Knowledge is always produced from somewhere, and your location shapes what you can and cannot see. They argue that the view from the margins is just as valid as the view from the center. Often, it is more complete. The field of gender and development has cited these scholars for decades. In practice, however, the field has largely ignored their message. The people we design programs for are not blank slates waiting to receive our knowledge. They are already knowers. They already have a standpoint. Until we start there, we are not doing gender work. We are doing imposition.
Are we still counting?
The purpose of gender training shouldn’t be to count. Can we still ask if there are any women present? Yes, but even if a woman attends every session, opens every account and sits in on every meeting, she may still hold no more power at home.
It’s time to examine the existing curriculum and design training modules that consider their audience. Gender training should identify deeply ingrained, unwritten norms that people no longer recognize as such but simply accept as the way things are. It should recognize that the most powerful barriers to equality are not the ones people can name when asked; they are the ones that feel like common sense.
You can’t reach those barriers with a pre-built curriculum. You must start with the chair.
So, what does the upgrade look like?
As I said, the discovery process changed how I work. Here’s what that means in practice and how it can benefit any organization willing to do things differently.
- The first change occurs when you start designing. It doesn’t happen before you meet the people. With them. This means entering communities before creating a curriculum, acknowledging the contradictions people are experiencing and allowing your findings to shape your work.
- The second shift is in what you measure. You can’t just measure attendance and completion rates; you also must assess how participants’ understanding and navigation of power in their lives has changed since they arrived.
- The third shift is in who you train. It’s not just the participants, but also the people designing the programs. A facilitator who has never examined the height of their own chair, who has never asked what they cannot see from their vantage point, will reproduce the preaching model, no matter how good their content is.
- The fourth shift is in what you do with the gap. Every program has one: the space between what it claims to have achieved and what participants experienced. The gap is where the program’s assumptions meet reality. It is where real learning occurs.
PS: None of this requires starting from scratch. It requires starting from the right place. It requires starting from the specific, culturally situated perspective of the person you are trying to reach.
—
The most important question in gender-responsive programming is not about your framework or theory of change, but whether you asked the relevant people before designing. The people involved have their own knowledge and experiences; they aren’t waiting for another lecture, but for someone to ask them about their perspective.