The future is entrusted to the youth, while societal balance and stability are based on women’s engagement; whereas the historical relation with nature is created by rural communities. Friends of Nature is profoundly aware of the social role and social advancement objective that FON wants to play; it is in line with our mission and vision. FON knits its activities around these three social segments to enhance their engagement in the care for nature and their enabled capacity to drive sustainable development.
Our programs and projects are conscientiously designed to promote gender equality, particularly that a large section of our activities approach local communities and promote sustainable development.
Our activities always address both genders and we toil to provide women of rural and local communities the social, cultural and intellectual space to interact, perform, define themselves in the context of our activities and to adopt their roles.
To attain these results, we work hard on engaging women in our projects and activities. Engaging is the first step to make women responsive to our views and actions; we place a lot of effort to address women individually and collectively, explain our work and open for them the potentials so they would join in.
After engagement comes empowerment and capacity building. When women interact and attend, they are able to receive the training they need and to surely implement and apply thereafter because they have realized the significance of their role.
This is in briefly our strategy for women engagement and empowerment. In all our activities we work to have at least half of the participants and beneficiaries of women.
There also we address gender equality. Our activities are always gender neutral. We support women to express themselves even in the most enduring activities without ever labelling actions as male or female. Most of our trainers are females. Our women team conducts field work and surveys in the most difficult and physical demanding terrain. We have engaged women skillfully in marine and reserve conservation and restoration actions.
The successful impact of our women engagement and empowerment actions are well sensed through our project documentaries. BirdLife International describes our leading role.
