From 4-6 March, in partnership with the European Capacity Building Initiative (ecbi), WEDO gathered a small group of experts in gender and climate change policy-making, to review progress and initiatives to advance women’s leadership and gender equality and explore ways to deepen collaboration and reach of our collective work.

The first part of the meeting focused on information-sharing on current programs and conversation on needs and future directions on Women’s Leadership in Climate-Change Decision Making. Both WEDO and ecbi/IIED shared the training approaches and modules they employ in their respective capacity building and training programs for new and inexperienced negotiators, particularly from Least Developed Countries (LDCs). While commonalities between the programs—the Women Delegates Fund (administered by WEDO) and the Training and Support (IIED) and Orxford Fellowship Programme (ecbi)—had been recognized for years, this in-depth exploration of each program’s history, structure, current calendar, and ongoing challenges and areas of potential exploration enabled direct discussion about the merits of different approaches and further conceptual-mapping of the landscape of capacity building needs.

Day 2 of the workshop turned the participants toward the second key topic, Gender and Climate Change, looking at both the UNFCCC mandates and programme of work and national-level implementation. WEDO shared the training materials it used with the National Gender and Climate Change Focal Points, which served as a jumping off point both for understanding the history of gender within the UNFCCC—and discussions of its future—and for discussing the various approaches and considerations with embedding gender expertise into national climate decision-making.