This story originally appeared on the CGIAR website.
“You can be an engineer and not be empowered.”
A junior officer from a Nepali ministry summed up the experience of women professionals who work in the water, energy, agriculture, and ecosystems (WEFE) sectors.
A senior officer supported this feeling of frustration: “Women are brainwashed by patriarchy, and since female officers face a lot of resistance, they end up wondering why bother?”
These experiences, among others, were shared in a 2022 study that examined the current state and future opportunities for integrating the management of WEFE sectors through WEFE nexus approaches in Nepal. Carried out by the CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains, the study also sought to assess barriers facing women professionals across these sectors, be it in Nepal’s government, research institutions, civil society, media, or non-governmental organizations. Everywhere, interviewees stressed the need for women professionals to gain confidence to lead in a work environment built and controlled by men, and gain confidence to advance WEFE nexus science and solutions to solve their country’s mounting environmental and climate problems.
Based on these inputs, NEXUS Gains researchers charted a way forward aiming to strengthen capacities to develop and implement nexus solutions and to advance gender equality in WEFE sectors.
The 2022 study, therefore, led to an experiment in empowerment: the WEFE Nexus Leadership Program. NEXUS Gains has now published the program’s training manual as well as an Innovation Profile to build on its success.
Gender equality and social inclusion are nexus issues
“The course had three main objectives,” explained Sanju Koirala of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) at a webinar in 2024. “First, to develop the technical knowledge and analytical, advocacy, and negotiation skills of WEFE-sector professionals. Second, to support transformational leadership in the WEFE sectors. And third, to develop a cadre of female professionals who are aware of – and able to address – the structural barriers to gender equality and social inclusion in their work.”
To what extent is gender equality and social inclusion a WEFE nexus issue? It is a very central one, the researchers insist. There is ample evidence of women’s roles and expertise in the management of WEFE resources, but the WEFE literature is often silent on gender, while women continue to be underrepresented as professionals — and even more rarely as leaders — in WEFE sectors.
The answer, then, was not just to strengthen leadership and negotiation skills (i.e., ‘general skills’) but to create champions equipped with the technical knowledge and tools and create the enabling conditions (including recognition and support networks) these champions need, to advance equitable WEFE nexus decision-making and implementation. It was a chance to build a well-connected group of Nepali professionals aware of, and able to address, structural barriers to gender equality and social inclusion within the WEFE sectors.
The program
The first edition of the WEFE Nexus Leadership Program launched in June 2023 as a collaboration between GREAT International, Governance Lab, IWMI, and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. The design combines transformational learning, which seeks to change the way participants think about their work, and experiential learning, which allows participants to put their new ideas into practice and internalize the learning. For instance, the participants were asked to keep journals between sessions recording any episodes of exclusion, marginalization, or active inclusion that they witnessed.
The material ranged from nexus science to discussions on workplace gender dynamics and methods of transformative leadership. The program also included a mentoring component. Mentors (19 of them) joined six course sessions and formed mentoring pairs with the program’s 22 participants.
Most participants and mentors were women, but some were men, as the aim was to support change, including in gender equality and social inclusion, across WEFE sectors — a task which necessarily requires men’s support. Although launched in Kathmandu, the program is designed to be rolled out to more regions of the country, at the provincial and sub-provincial (local) levels, and to other countries with help from the detailed training manual.
Ideas that spread
The inaugural cohort graduated from the program in December 2023, but with continued support from NEXUS Gains, they are continuing their leadership journeys in WEFE sectors. In 2024, four participants organized and facilitated workshops with the support of GREAT International to share what they had learned about nexus approaches, gender equality, and social inclusion with colleagues from their departments. Participants with teaching roles have introduced nexus thinking in their classrooms, while others have started including nexus approaches in their proposals. Many say they are looking for opportunities to advocate and lead wherever they go: from workshops to formal and informal discussions, or policy circles.
Based on results from this first edition of the WEFE Nexus Leadership Program, Oxfam International’s ‘Transboundary Rivers of South Asia’ project is adapting the program in collaboration with IWMI to train WEFE actors, including local women leaders, from Rangoon Watershed in Sudurpaschim Province in developing and implementing equitable WEFE nexus innovations. The adapted training will be delivered in December 2024.
Since the conclusion of the program’s first edition, “We conducted a virtual meeting with the first cohort to reconnect,” Koirala reports. “We have noticed their network has been strengthened, because they have become friends and know each other more, inviting each other to events in their organizations. One direct outcome recently was a provincial workshop organized together with Oxfam’s project. In fact, one of the past course participants took charge of that workshop together with the GREAT International and Governance Lab team.”
When she talks to the women who were part of the program’s first cohort, Koirala now hears very different stories from the frustrations voiced in the study two years ago.
In the words of one recent interviewee: “The program has broadened my understanding on nexus approaches as well as my confidence. No matter which organization I will work with, I will always advocate for WEFE nexus approaches and integrate them in my work in my own capacity.”
For more information, contact Sanju Koirala, Researcher s.koirala@cgiar.org
This work was carried out under the CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains, which is grateful for the support of CGIAR Trust Fund contributors: www.cgiar.org/funders