Gender and Elections workshop ran in Islamabad

Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) aims at capacity building of its employees using BRIDGE methodology with the assistance of stakeholders. International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) is rendering its assistance and support to ECP in its capacity enhancement and a plethora of such projects are being run for imparting comprehensive training to the staff of ECP where IFES is supporting as a partner in order to achieve the objective of conducting fair elections in 2018 with the help of well-trained staff.

ECP’s second Five Year Strategic Plan (2014–18); lays special emphasis on gender mainstreaming in electoral process. Strategic goal No. 8 has exclusively been denoted for the purpose and fifteen objectives have been set under this goal. Among fifteen, the following four objectives encompass training arena:

1. Develop curriculum/ material for training of the ECP officials on gender issues and implement it through FEA (Objective No. 6)

2. Train ECP master trainers on gender specific training for managing gender-related training needs (Objective No. 10)

3. Make all training and voter education material gender sensitive and work towards building a gender-sensitive culture in the ECP (Objective No. 11)

4. Include gender matters in the training of security and polling personnel(Objective No. 14)

There has been a need for customized BRIDGE module for Gender and Elections in order to cater the requirement and needs of employees of Election Commission of Pakistan and this workshop aimed at providing gender sensitivity for ECP future management.