Abstract:

The concept of a Community of Practice refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem, collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations. It refers as well to the stable group that is formed from such regular interactions. (Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.).
As a result of several virtual discussions and other networking experiences, United Nations International Institute for Training and Research for the Advancement of Women (UN–INSTRAW) started in the year 2008, a Community of Practice (CoP) on Gender Training, which aims to bring together gender training practitioners from all over the world with a diversity of knowledge and experiences on gender training in multiple topics and contexts. This Gender Training Community of Practice promotes dialogue and analysis of the state of the art in gender training, identification of the achievements and challenges and reflection on how gender training can be strengthened as a component of gender mainstreaming and sustainable development.
Through different networking and interactive tools, the Gender Training Community of Practice therefore aims to keep track and analyze the experience of gender training over time and to promote knowledge creation and knowledge generation on gender training over a long-term period, so that existing experiences and lessons learned can be applied to future initiatives, which will then be evaluated and the results fed back into the CoP’s activities. Moreover consolidated resources that build on the expertise and experience of CoP participants, including tools, checklists, supports, guidance, results of analysis and good practice profiles, and other materials are produced. Another important achievement is the Gender Training Wiki a global participatory database on Gender Training to which Community of Practice collaborates to. It is intended to provide a centralized resource centre for gender trainers, academics, gender mainstreaming, knowledge management and development experts and practitioners, as well as individuals and organizations in general looking for gender training opportunities and resources and funding for their activities.
This paper analyzes the experience of the Gender Training Community of Practice and how online tools can be used to create and facilitate global communities of practice as ongoing social learning processes and a strategy to make gender capacity development processes more effective. For UN-INSTRAW, as well as for other UN agencies, capacity building involves an integral process of creating and building on existing capacities so that individuals, organizations and societies can put those capacities into subsequent action to achieve their development objectives.

Keywords:

Gender equality, Capacity development, Communities of Practice, Interactive Tools, Virtual Dialogues.