About my work

I haven’t talked too much about it yet. Let’s clarify. I am intern in the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). UNIFEM has sub-regional offices, country offices and project offices. The office where I work in falls under a specific ‘’UN project’’. This is the Liaison Office with the African Union and the UNECA (Economic Commission for Africa). Those latter have the biggest UN compound, just next door to our old and grey building. We are the outsider of the UN. Soite. Anyways, basically the overall goal of the establishment of the UNIFEM Liaison Office is to strengthen UNIFEM institutional capacity to strategically and systematically engage in policy dialogue, partnership development, and to provide technical assistance to the African Union and UNECA. To be simple. Haha. ’’ One of UNIFEM Liaison Office’s missions is to promote and support the African Union leadership towards state accountability for women’s human rights in Africa. Its role is as much to influence policy development as to raise UNIFEM’s visibility at the AU level, working closely with other parts of the UN system, as well as regional women’s rights networks. UNIFEM supports the participation of gender equality advocates and influences the AU department to promote the implementation of its gender equality commitments.’’ SO this is a lot of policy advises and lots of documents to get familiarized with.
The problem they have is that they are only two programming staff. Actually, one is Programme officer (Tikikel, with who i share the office, who is young, Ethiopian and very nice) And the other one, Florence (the boss from Uganda) is the representative to the AU and ECA. Then comes Firdawok, the logistic and administration officer, Gadlu (I finally got his name btw) the nicest driver and me, the intern without computer (yet) nor internet (probably this I will never get, today’s news. So pissed off!). Being a project office, we fall under two different administrations: 1st the UNIFEM headquarters in N-Y, second we are also dependent on the UNDP office for strange reasons. So for example, to get a computer for me, we need to get the authorization from N-Y then to go beg UNDP to get the Purchase O and then go to the supplier. Mouaha, so everything takes unbelievably long and most of their work in occupied by administration. This is already frustrating!
Anyways, my position. Being a Liaison Office, they should have quite a lot of communication with their partners. Right? They actually don’t really. The office exists since a year and a half and hasn’t done so much programmes and projects so far. They helped the AU to create the ender Policy. They organised workshop and did lots of other thing i still have to figure out. But They haven’t have the time or resources to create a real communication strategy to link all the partners on regular and formal basis. So it is basically what I am here to do. I believe there is a lot to do and I hope i can manage to get the information and the contacts I need to put something in place.
The first concrete project is the newsletter. ‘’The newsletter will help the different structures involved to communicate more closely on a regular basis, to keep them updated on the gender activities of the AU and other organs. It will also motivate those actors to work more closely together, as it will help them to understand each other’s roles and to identify the potential area of collaboration. The overall goal is to ensure a regular flow of information on gender equality and women empowerment within the AU, and offer a platform for dialogue between stakeholders.’’ I handed in the first draft of the concept note and got positive feedback. We’ll meet there Gender Directorate of the African Union next week to present the concept note, to work on it together and to finalize it as well.
If there is a real will to start a formal communication process from the different sides of the partnership and if people are responsive, there will be lots of work. We aim at stimulate involvement from the commissioners themselves (of the AU Commission) or at least from the directors of the department. Hopefully some will be interested and not only talking. The gender policy is a first important step, but now remain to see if they are ready to take action…