Hello UN-REDD,

Such a rationale and approach spoken about in Dr. Maya Morsi’s statement above is precisely what UN-REDD aims to achieve in its efforts on promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. In line with this ongoing commitment to mainstreaming gender and highlighting and championing the role of women in the protection, conservation and restoration of forests, the UN-REDD Programme is pleased to: 

1. Share new resources: a useful tool to monitor gender participation in meetings, and the gender and forest resource library
2. Share progress on efforts to integrate a gender approach and build internal capacity on gender within the UN-REDD Programme; and 
3. Provide a snapshot of gender perspectives shared at the December 2023 UN-REDD Executive Board Meeting. 

This information aims to help partner countries and stakeholders in incorporating a gender approach into their REDD+ action as well as provide information on how a gender approach is being integrated into UN-REDD Programme support. 

As we know, more and more people are aware about gender and the need to increase the number of women in forestry discussions and decision-making. Greater attention has been paid to letting women have a seat at the table, but there are often many constraints which inhibit their full and genuine participation. For example, women may lack the confidence to speak up in meetings or they may find that male facilitators or participants dominate or pay less attention to women’s ideas or suggestions. As such, the very valuable and unique contributions of women to forest governance are often limited.

To help confront this issue, the UN-REDD Gender Team is pleased to share a new tool, available in 

which is adapted from CIFOR’s “Field guide to Adaptive Collaborative Management and improving women’s participation” (2014).

The aim of the tool is to:



• Measure how many men and women participate in a given meeting or workshop; 
• Analyze the quality and effectiveness of their participation by assessing how often women and men express their opinions or present ideas; and 
• Assess how often their ideas or proposals are accepted or adopted.  

As such, the tool enables:

• Organizers as well as participants to better understand the quality of participation from a gender perspective; and  
• Assessment of whether participation between men and women is unbalanced, the tool encourages participants to reflect on steps they could take to facilitate more even participation from men and women in future meetings or workshops. 

Some examples of potential solutions could include:

• Selecting a woman to facilitate the meeting; 
• Breaking into women-only and men-only focus groups;
• Strengthen guidance and abilities of facilitators to engage all participants; 
• Including gender awareness and objectives in the content of the meeting; or
• Asking all participants to simultaneously use the tool for some time during a future meeting to raise awareness and help them reflect on men and women participation.  

Use of the tool takes some additional effort, but the benefits of more gender-balanced participation are sure to compensate for these efforts.



Taking advantage of the results it can generate and the information it can be provide, this tool was recently used at a webinar on REDD+ safeguards requirements conducted in December 2022. During this webinar the participation of women and men was tracked through written participation in the chat, interactive exercises as well as verbal interaction during questions or discussions. The percentage of attendance of men and women participants was similar (i.e. about 50% each) and no significant differences were identified in the verbal or written participation of these two groups. UN-REDD will continue using the tool to gather gender-disaggregated information and complementary actions may be defined to encourage effective participation. 

Acknowledging the critical role of gender in REDD+, the UN-REDD Programme has been striving to systematically promote gender equality in its work since 2008. As a result of these efforts, the need was identified for a more holistic, systematic and comparable approach to measuring how gender has been integrated into UN-REDD work. In response, the UN-REDD Gender Marker Rating System was created in 2017 to track and monitor the gender responsiveness of the UN-REDD Technical Assistance Programme.

Since then, on a yearly basis, UN-REDD has been assessing the outputs of first the 2018-2020 TA’s programme and since 2021, the 2021-2025 TA programme, to establish how and to what degree they advance or contribute to achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women. As illustrated in the below graphic, a three-point rating scale [i.e. GEN-0 (gender blind), GEN-1 (gender partially integrated and GEN-2 (gender responsive)], based on four criteria, was used to help in this assessment and classification. This assessment has also been broken down at the country level .

A total of 54 outputs across UN-REDD partner countries and knowledge management support were part of the portfolio of UN-REDD support in 2021. Of these 54 outputs, 23 (43%) of them achieved a GEN 2 rating. This was a slight increase over previous years, in which 42% of the total 55 TA outputs in 2020 and 35% in 2019 achieved a GEN 2 rating (in 2018 only 22% of outputs achieved a GEN 2 rating). Conversely, the amount of GEN 1 ratings decreased in 2021, wherein 44% of the 2021 outputs received a GEN 1 rating, compared to 56% in 2020. The trend of fluctuating GEN 1 ratings can be seen with 2019 and 2018 results as well, wherein 40% of the outputs in 2019 and 56% of the outputs in 2018 received a GEN 1 rating. 

With the acknowledgement of the continued need of gender support to the Programme to uphold and further improve upon the gender-responsiveness of TA outputs, the overall steady increase of GEN 2 ratings is positive. This gender support and capacity building (as illustrated below) was one of the key gender activities of the Programme in 2022 and such support will continue in 2023 as well.

With the objective to inform and further support the UN-REDD Team and increase their gender mainstreaming efforts within the UN-REDD TA services, an internal Seminar on Gender was organized in August 2022. More specifically, the Seminar aimed to achieving the following:

• Recommunicate the gender approach of the Programme and the available tools and guidance documents;
• Present the Gender Marker and its progress;
• Highlight gender entry points and show the relevance of gender in the UN-REDD 2021-2025 Programme; 
• Identify recommendations and good practice examples for planning, monitoring, reporting and communication on gender mainstreaming efforts; and
• Gather feedback and understand gender knowledge gaps and needs among the UN-REDD team members in countries / regions / global levels.

In total, 58 UN-REDD staff members (18 men and 40 women) joined the webinars. For those who could not join, workshop materials, including video recordings, were made available and e-mailed to the UN-REDD entire team after the webinars took place.

This Seminar was instrumental in identifying key gender gaps and needs from the UN-REDD Team.  

Some key gender gaps identified were:

• Ongoing challenge of cultivating meaningful and gender equitable participation within decision-making spheres in a still male dominated sector, and - 
• Capacity gaps on gender at country level, wherein it is often only equated with promoting gender equal participation. 

The gender needs identified also focused on similar topics, such as:

• Need to create a gender-specific grant/funding stream to support increased technical capacities at the national level in integrating a gender approach; 
• Developing additional simple and straightforward tools to be used by non-specialist/trained field staff to mainstream gender and monitor progress; and
• Supporting outreach programmes for identifying, monitoring and documenting behavioral change around women's pivotal role in forest management. 

Various recommendations for planning, monitoring, reporting and communication on gender mainstreaming were also suggested, including:

• Creating a catalogue of examples of gender-responsive REDD+ actions on certain key focus areas of UN-REDD (e.g. REDD+ finance, benefit distribution, carbon markets, etc.) be developed. 
• Raising more awareness within UN-REDD support on the contribution of indigenous women in strengthening forest governance and sustainable management of forests; and 
• Establishing a direct and closer link between gender specialists and country leads in order facilitate the collection of gender inputs for reporting, as it is sometimes easier to verbally discuss rather than send written inputs.

This helpful feedback has been reviewed by the UN-REDD Gender Team, and has informed the team's support and work plan for 2023.

The UN-REDD Programme held its 6th Executive Board (EB) Meeting in Rome Italy on 1 December 2022. With 28 members (16 men and 12 women) in attendance, strategic dialogues on climate finance, capacity development and knowledge management were held. Around these themes, the topic of gender was intertwined into discussions, with EB members reinforcing some similar gender gaps and needs that the UN-REDD Team had discussed during the August UN-REDD Internal Seminar on Gender (see summary above). The fruitful inventions from members on gender ranged from flagging the need for additional gender capacity building and business models that equitably engage women to highlighting efforts by UN-REDD partners to close gender finance gaps in support and participation.

The UN-REDD Programme is pleased to share a new Gender and Forestry Resources Library which contains a growing collection of useful resources related to gender and forestry. These resources range from country specific examples and technical papers to infographics and scientific papers. Along with various helpful UN-REDD resources and tools on gender and REDD+, a link to this library can also directly be found on the bottom of UN-REDD’s gender page (https://www.un-redd.org/work-areas/gender-equality). 

Thank you for reading!

If you have any questions and/or would like to add a publication to the library, please email:

Elizabeth Eggerts,

UNDP REDD+ Gender Specialist, at

[email protected].