Call for Application: "My Voice My Action - CSO Application"

The year 2020 represents a landmark in efforts to promote and protect women’s rights both globally and continentally. It marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, the twentieth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325; the seventeenth anniversary for the Maputo Protocol, and the sixteenth anniversary of the Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa (SDGEA).

The anniversary of UNSCR 1325, in particular, provides a useful platform for a clarion call to accelerate efforts at achieving the objectives of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda. UNSCR 1325 also provides a powerful normative framework for galvanizing multifaceted and multi-level action to ensure women’s needs, voices and perspectives to prevent, resolve and recover from conflict and build sustainable peace are effectively represented.

There is no doubt that some progress has been made in advancing the women, peace, and security agenda on the continent. Yet, more needs to be done, particularly to narrow down the gender gap in interventions relating to peace and security. Structural barriers still inhibit women’s participation, while the absence of and failure to use gender-disaggregated data result in lopsided analyses and mask the impact of plans, program, and actions to improve equality for men and women. Similarly, the lack of gender-disaggregated data renders invisible the true contribution of women to developments in all spheres of life.

It is against this background that the Gender Peace and Security program(GPSP) in collaboration with the Training for Peace (TfP) Africa Program as well as the Economic Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) Gender and Peace and Security Clusters, are launching a campaign on the 20th anniversary of the UNSCR 1325. The campaign will take stock of the progress made in the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda on the continent, the challenges faced and the way forward to address these challenges. The campaign, titled “My voice, My Action”, is proposed to have three main components, namely:

• To identify useful lessons in the efforts of the African Union and its Member States in the promotion of women’s rights and gender equality to build on the strides made;
• To acknowledge and document the role and contributions of civil society organizations (CSOs), in particular, those working on women’s issues, in the implementation of the WPS agenda; and
• To call for the further enhancement of efforts to promote and protect women’s rights through more gender-responsive decision-making, guided by gender- sensitive reporting.

In light of this, we are launching a call for applications for all African CSOs interested in being part of the campaign and actively involved in the WPS agenda.

ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA
CSOs seeking to present their applications should meet the following eligibility requirements:
1. Be a national, regional or continental CSO engaged in the areas of women, peace and security;
2. Have objectives and principles that are consistent with the principles and objectives of the African Union as set out in Articles 3 and 4 of the Constitutive Act;
3. Be registered in a member state of the African Union;
4. CSOs that discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, tribe, ethnicity, race or political basis shall be barred from participating in the campaign;
5. Adherence to the Code of Ethics and Conduct for CSOs affiliated to or working with the African Union.

APPLICATION
All CSOs interested in being part of the campaign are requested to submit the following:

1. Short introduction of the organization and its mandate;

2. 2-3 key achievements or success stories of the organization relative to one of the four pillars of UNSCR 1325 (participation, prevention, protection, relief and recovery). Please be specific with regards to the impact the work has had in the area of the selected pillar, and how an intervention has resulted in true impact in the lived experiences of women;

3. 2-3 recommendations on how to ensure sustained progress in the implementation of the women, peace and security agenda. This component can draw on the lessons learnt of interventions that have been attempted but not succeeded, and is intended to productively take stock of the challenges and even failures encountered in the context of women, peace and security, as a basis for crafting more successful and interventions;

4. Media (pictures or videos) representation of the organizations selected work in the selected pillar.

Both the achievements and the recommendations are expected to draw and represent the accounts of lived experiences in the field of women, peace and security. Applicants are highly encouraged to reflect the “My Voice, My Action” theme of the campaign by narrating their success stories, lessons learnt and recommendations through the voices and experiences of the women whose lives they seek to impact and improve relative to UNSCR 1325. Applicants are encouraged to “tell the story” of these women through real-life narratives that can be captured in writing or other visual media, such as photography. In making the selection, the principles of geographic parity will be applied.

All submissions should be included in a single document (word/PDF) and sent to the following email address myvoicemyaction@africa-union.org under the subject line “MY VOICE MY ACTION- CSO APPLICATION”

Closing date for the submission of applications with all supporting documents is 30 September 2020. Applications received after this deadline will not be considered.