In Malawi: Lisandra Lannes

Personal experiences of a Gender Advisor



Since the adoption of Beijing Declaration and Platform for action in the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995), State members have expressed their political committment to establish a transformed partnership based on equality between women and men with a view to achieving sustainable development. From that time, gender equality has become a matter of human rights and a necessary and fundamental prerequisite for human development.

The professional status of gender advisors has taken a greater place in developing countries over the past few years. Gender trainings, considered as tools for gender equality promotion, have also increased in developed countries as well as in developing countries.

Lisandra Lannes, gender advisor 2008-2009 for CADECOM, a Uniterra partner organization based in Mangochi, Malawi shares her personal experiences.

What does gender mean?
Gender refers to the roles and responsibilities of women and men that are created in our families, our societies and our cultures. The full participation of all groups in society, especially women, in the development process, need to address gender inequalities and to overcome women’s subordination to men in society in order to prevent women from equitable development. It requires a change of attitude and behavior to transform unequal relationships.

“In the Catholic Development Commission of Malawi, I mainly worked in the agricultural sector. My mandate : to explore differences in women’s and men’s roles and responsabilities so that development projects on food security, humanitarian assistance and reconstruction, water and sanitation, management of natural resources, associations and cooperatives, etc. can identify and meet the different needs of women and men by examining the malawian particular social and cultural contexts and obstacles to women’s advancement.”

A gender advisor contributes to the promotion of participatory democracy and local governance. As for me, I had to use a participatory approach in my daily work to engage community members in the implementation of initiatives and actions for development. I noticed that a greater importance to the bottom up approach was given to meet beneficiaries’ needs.

Working for a catholic organization, a gender advisor should respect catholic teachings and values with regard to Church’s conservative discourse, which might sometimes be inconsistent with feminist principles.   

Constraints and opportunities
Most of the gender trainings aim to enhance capacity-building and skills in gender. Different target groups participate actively in the analysis of gender disparities in their villages and play a key role in identifying relevant actions to support necessary transformations for the achievement of equality by taking further measures to improve the situation of women.
In Malawi, Gender trainings remain a popular education tool for communities (beneficiaries) and encourage sensitization and awareness-raising. At the same time, they are more specialized when they are oriented towards program officers (coordinators) or executive directors (decision-makers). To meet new gender equality requirements, development organizations have to put proper mechanisms in place to integrate a gender perspective in policy planning, programming and projects activities.



Gender training is one of the key activities, which is developed and systematized to support internal efforts to mainstream gender. It has to be part of a concrete action plan that establishes attainable and clear objectives, performance indicators and results with a view to achieving gender equality. The beginning of a social change promoting a better sharing of roles and responsibilities within the family and the society has to go through the mobilization of all groups in society, especially communitarian leaders, who have to embrace the « gender cause ». The identification of common strategies and actions ensures people’s engagement and interest in the cause. The success of gender mainstreaming implementation also implies that executive directors make an endeavor to translate their commitment into action.

Finally, we have to replace Malawian women within their own sociocultural context by mentionning that they do not necessarily claim an equal status to men in society, unlike the feminists. However, some of them are not satisfied with a complementary relationship and aspire to more equal relationships.

Fotina Imani, program officer for CADECOM, gives a clear overview of women’s situation:
“Malawian women experience common relationship problems, which prevent them from an equal distribution of roles and responsibilities: heavy workload, control over resources and benefits, limited participation in the decision-making process and unequal distribution of household income.”

Therefore, development agents have to pursue their efforts to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality hoping that women will take up their rightful place and space in society, according to human rights.

Photos and text: Lisandra Lannes, volunteer
Gender advisor for CADECOM, Mangochi, Malawi (2008-2009)