Driving change through Generation Equality commitments

We are part of  the Generation Equality initiative by making our commitments to support gender equality.

The Generation Equality Forum is a landmark global initiative, driving commitments that embed gender equality. This forum is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to catalyze long-term change for women and girls around the world. In addition, it has an important role to play in the recovery from COVID-19 and in promoting significant and lasting change for future generations.

The Forum is galvanizing international organizations alongside other social actors globally to advance gender equality commitments and ensure concrete, sustainable results. We are excited to reveal that we are supporting The Generation Equality Forum by giving our strong commitments to gender equality.

Our programmatic commitments

Externally we commit to:

• Crosscut prevention of female genital mutilation (FGM) within our livelihood work that focuses on empowering women economically.
• Engage traditional and faith leaders, men and boys in promoting gender equality and eliminating FGM and other forms of violence against women and girls.
• Empower women and girls to identify and claim their right to bodily integrity.
• Mainstream prevention of FGM together with our local partners in all our 2022-25 programme interventions in rural and remote areas
  of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somaliland.

Internally we commit to: 

• Support our own and partners’ staff in finding context-specific strategies for addressing harmful gender stereotypes, rigid gender norms and unequal gender power relations that uphold FGM.
• Systematically collect data among our target communities regarding
  behavioural aims, attitudes and knowledge regarding FGM, and to use and share the data to drive policy and programming.

These commitments contribute to the GBV (Gender-Based Violence) Action Coalition which is led by e.g. UN Women, WHO and Kenya. Our commitment in ISF is one of the few Finnish commitments inside the GBV Coalition.

We believe that the Generation Equality Action Coalitions are the world’s roadmap for gender equality.  Together we are working towards a better world for women and girls.