GAYA Peer to Peer Learning Approach
The Gender and Youth Activity (GAYA) facilitates spaces for implementing partners (IPs) to share learning, discuss challenges, and collectively problem-solve around gender and youth integration.
Peer-to-Peer Learning
The Gender and Youth Activity (GAYA) nourishes inclusion through innovative and diverse peer-to-peer learning opportunities. GAYA understands that effective collaboration and knowledge sharing are essential to the quality and impact of food security activities, especially when it comes to addressing the deeply-rooted, intersectional barriers facing women and youth. That’s why GAYA works to create spaces for sharing, learning, and problem-solving by bringing together food security program implementers from around the world.
GAYAs peer-to-peer learning efforts includes:
- The Nourishing Inclusion Blog Series
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In September 2022, GAYA hosted a participatory discussion for implementers to reflect on lessons learned from gender and youth programming during the last few years of massive global shocks and stresses. Collectively, webinar participants defined nine commitments organizations can make to reduce the unequal impact of food crises on marginalized populations, with a focus on women and youth.
Since then, GAYA has provided these implementers with a platform to share stories of their work, highlighting how these commitments translate into practice. You can read their stories below (available in English and French):
- Leveraging Data to Address Gender-Based Inequalities: Lessons from Burkina Faso
- Adapting in Evolving Contexts: The Role of Recurrent Monitoring Surveys to Inform Decision Making
- Tool Spotlight: Gender Transformative Toolkit
- How Knolwedge Sharing Improves Programming: Lessons from the Sahel
- Towards Flourishing Futures: The Role of Pulic and Private Sector Engagement for Sustainable Youth Solutions in Mail
- Adapting Gender Transformative Approaches During Crises: Lessons from Uganda and Kenya
- Breaking the Cycle: How Social Behavioral Change is Fighting Forced Marriage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
- The Cultivating Inclusion for Food Security (Cultivate) Fellowship
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GAYA’s Cultivate Fellowship is a 3-month-long capacity-strengthening opportunity for field-based emergency and resilience food security implementers who are interested in gender and youth inclusion. The Cultivate Fellowship is designed to provide regionally-based cohorts of implementers to work, learn, and problem-solve together. Participants grow a network of change agents from emergency and resilience programs in their region, opening the door to ongoing reflection and collaborative problem-solving.
The Cultivate Fellowship supports fellows to design and use qualitative methods to address their program-specific questions and deepen their contextual understanding of social inclusion and resilience dynamics of their activities, in order to adapt programming for transformative change.
- GAYA’s Small Grants Program
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The GAYA Small Grants Program aims to address key issues within the collection, analysis, and use of data on gender and youth within BHA’s resilience, food security, and emergency response activities.
In 2023, GAYA conducted a thorough application process to select three small grant award recipients. With the GAYA team’s support and small grant funds, these three organizations will implement two-year projects to integrate gender and youth more fully into their activities. In addition to providing specialized support in gender, youth, and program management, GAYA will support the development, testing, packaging, and sharing of knowledge management products.
Through sharing their process improvements, innovations, and/or research around the collection and use of gender and/or youth data, these small grantees will empower other food security implementers to improve the quality and impact of their own work.
Meet GAYA’s sub-Awardees:
- Catholic Relief Services Zimbabwe, implementing the project: Gender and Youth Integration for Improved Food Security.
- Centre d’Actions pour l’Environnement et le Développement Durable (ACED), implementing the project: Strengthening capacities of African implementers in understanding, integrating, and applying gender and youth data for inclusive interventions in food security and nutrition.
- Women’s Refugee Commission, implementing the project: Building Protective Assets of Adolescents in Emergencies Using Evidence-Based and Participatory Tools and Approaches: Piloting and Evaluating the I’m Here Approach in Santa Marta and Ciénaga, Colombia.
- Driving Dialogue through Public Events
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GAYA hosts participatory, public knowledge-sharing events that serve both as a platform for peer-to-peer learning, as well as capacity-strengthening opportunities.
GAYA webinars serve as pivotal platforms for fostering an in-depth understanding of the multifaceted challenges surrounding inclusive food security, while also presenting innovative solutions and best practices to address these pressing issues.