Gender policies once again win the Good Practice Awards

If the VIII Regional Good Practices Award (2023), always jointly organized by UNDP and ORU Fogar, had awarded three projects dedicated to fight against gender violence, the IX Award of 2024 has also highlighted three very unique projects dedicated to gender policies. Thus, already at the closing ceremony of ORU Fogar's Annual Assembly held in Barcelona on October 2, the State of Pará, Brazil; the Province of Córdoba, Argentina, and Catalonia received their awards and were able to showcase projects committed to equality.

Hana Ghassan Tuma, vice-governor of the State of Pará, received the award for the “Project for all Women: the place and power of women in politics”. This is an initiative with a background of several years, which seeks to empower women so that they can exercise their civic responsibilities. It starts, however, at the grassroots level and thus promotes basic services to women, such as health services or the promotion of employment.

The winning project from Córdoba, “Centro Integral de Varones en situación de violencia” (Integrated Center for Men in Situations of Violence), is based on the premise that it is essential to work with men to address gender-based violence and mitigate the progressive increase in the pedagogy of cruelty. Claudia Martínez, Women's Secretary, explained a project that ends up dealing with situations that derive from the judicial sphere and that often require psychological or psychiatric attention. She explained that the center monitors all those affected and promotes workshops that “help to control emotions”.

The third project, presented by the Generalitat de Catalunya, is the “Universality of reusable menstrual products. “La meva regla, les meves regles” (My period, my rules). This pioneering practice aims to guarantee free access to a reusable menstrual product to all menstruating women between the ages of 10 and 60 (2.5 million people). This ensures that they can decide freely and in an informed manner how they want to manage their menstrual cycle throughout their lives, thus reversing violations of sexual and reproductive rights that are linked to the endemic inequalities that affect this population.

Another award went to the Joint Office for Sustainable Food (OCAS), also presented by Catalonia. This office, which involves the participation of two public administrations: the Barcelona City Council and the Generalitat de Catalunya, aims to share strategies, objectives and resources to contribute to the transformation of the food system towards a sustainable food model. The Office has already promoted several initiatives against food waste, but, above all, it has promoted a logistics center for the exchange of local products “Terra Pagesa”.

The winning list is completed with the project from the Province of Manabí, Ecuador, “Transforming data into effective actions for development (Local Information System in Manabí as an Intelligent Territory)”. The main objective of this system is to generate a comprehensive tool to facilitate decision-making based on accurate and updated data.