Programme Unit on Gender Equality and Governance

Unit will bring together practitioners, researchers, policymakers, academics, administrators and other experts to build exchange of ideas, shape narrative in shaping discourse for just and equal society with conditions for every person to express their potentialities. This is an internal unit of TRIF driven by our core values of Justice, Equality, Impact. The Unit anchored by experienced professional with deep expertise and experience and supported by experts with past work will closely work first with TRIF colleagues in engendering development perspective and engagement processes and support them in building business processes that integrates engendering in ongoing work. Unit bring in evidence-based practices addressing the challenges facing our society drawing on existing body of knowledge from movements and experts to introduce evidenced pathways and interventions for a more equitable society. TRIF’s action field offers space for action-research, learning and evidence generation through collaboration across sectors, organisations and domains particularly focusing on interlinkages with issues of local governance and collective action. The research and policy recommendations including action-policy research will be available for wider public dissemination. The Unit will also conduct research and analysis on critical policy issues and offer solutions that are both relevant and practical in the context of implementation.

TRIF’s field building efforts and actions will co-evolve with stakeholders and in context of pilots and policy in action intervention. Focusing on a praxis and action-research approach to develop knowledge, processes; building a repository of best practices and research on subject and building evidence based support. In terms of broad intent wewill focus on developing required cross- disciplinary expertise on organisation development dimensions related to women’s participation in governance evolving meaningful resilient programmes at grassroots complementing the existing community mobilisation efforts through NRLM. Centre will integrate evidence-based policy research, co-build implementation and action research platform with stakeholders and provide leadership on the subject of improving the agency and participation of women in local governance. Unit will seek to work both in India and globally and generate new practice to inform and shape discourse on ‘gender equality in local governance’. Our effort goes beyond knowledge building, research with strong focus on action-research it seeks to create demonstrative results and for TRIF is to emerge as the go-to institution for building solutions that address the specific issues faced by rural women in local governance. Unit would work with experienced professionals and proactively seek out opportunity to mount programmes that provide space for demonstration and learning; and work with documentation, researcher, technology developers to develop practitioners’ handbooks/manuals.