In the 28th episode of the IGC podcast, Hannah Reinl speaks with Corinne Momal-Vanian, Executive Director of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International Gender Champion and Karen Zamberia, Program Officer with the Kofi Annan Foundation.
They discuss the importance of walking the talk to promote gender equality in the small world of the workplace as well as the big world through programmatic change.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hannah Reinl
Hello and welcome to the May episode of our IGC Podcast. I'm Hannah Reinl from the International Gender Champions Secretariat in Geneva. Today, I am joined by Corinne Momal-Vanian, and Karen Zamberia from the Kofi Annan Foundation. Corinne Momal-Vanian is an International Gender Champion and the Executive Director of the Kofi Annan Foundation. Before taking up this role, she worked in a number of senior positions and different countries for the United Nations, most recently as Director of Conference Management, and before that, as Director of Information at the the United Nations Office in Geneva. Welcome Corinne.
Corinne Momal-Vanian
Hi, Hannah, very happy to be here.
Hannah Reinl
And we're happy to have you. And you're not alone, you have brought with you Karen Zamberia. Karen is a program officer in the Elections and Democracy Program of the Kofi Annan Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, Karen was an information analyst at the Assessment Capacities Project where she focused on humanitarian response and refugee affairs. Before moving to Geneva, she was a researcher at the Media Institute of Southern Africa, working on human rights and media freedom in Eswatini. Karen, a big welcome to you as well.
Karen Zamberia
Thanks for having me.
Hannah Reinl
So you two have actually suggested today's topic for the name of the episode, which is "Gender Equality in Our Big and Small Worlds." So from what I understood, this was based off a Kofi Annan quote, who said that, "you have to take care of your big world, like your small world." And I would interpret this as saying that you have to consider both your immediate surroundings and the world at large. So thinking really from the local to the global level. Now I'm wondering, how do you both translate this approach into your work and into the work that aims at promoting gender equality?
Corinne Momal-Vanian
Well, Hannah, first of all, your right in your interpretation of what Kofi Annan meant by this saying. It meant he was the same person with the colleagues around him and with the leaders of the world whom he had to interact with. It means that your relations with others have to be guided by the same philosophy, whatever their levels, whatever the nature of your interaction with them. And this is indeed what we try to do at the foundation internally and externally. So you have to walk the talk.
There are many organizations we saw, unfortunately, in media reports, in recent years, who talk very good talk about inclusion, about respect and don't necessarily implement it inside. So you know, we're certainly not perfect, but the advantage that we have at the Foundation is that we're small, so we can't sweep anything under the carpet, really. We're too small for that. Karen can confirm, but I think we try to have an open style of discussion inside the organization. We very much have tried to integrate a gender component in everything that we do on the programmatic side -- and Karen will talk more about this later.
Kofi Annan was a great believer in gender equality. There are tons of quotes regarding how he saw that it was at the core of everything that you want to achieve in peace, in development, in human rights. However, for lots of different reasons, maybe it wasn't as integrated in the in the heart of what we do at the Foundation as it could be. So we've tried to change that a bit.
Karen Zamberia
In my view at the local level, it just means working to promote gender equality in our most immediate communities, such as within families and schools and in workplaces, as Karina has mentioned. It means also challenging gender stereotypes in our day-to-day engagements with people raising awareness about gender discrimination and other issues when the opportunity to do so arises. The assumption is that several combined efforts at the local level can have a positive and cumulative effect on a global scale. At the global level, it could mean amplifying the voices and demands from the local level and ensuring that the agendas of local communities are promoted and supported by international frameworks and institutions like our own at the foundation.
Hannah Reinl
I'm getting a bit of a sense that a smaller world might actually be vaster than we might think at first. Corinne as the Executive Director of the Kofi Annan Foundation, you alluded to this already, we have seen an evolving understanding of gender equality work as something that really needs to start from within. Organisations that promote gender equality through their programmatic work, also really need to walk the talk when it comes to the work environment and organisational culture -- so to the small world if you want to stick to the metaphor. What has been your personal and professional experience over the years when it comes to gender equality at work? What are some of the initiatives and activities that you implemented at the Kofi Annan Foundation to make sure that you advance gender equality and inclusion in the workplace.
Corinne Momal-Vanian
You know, Hannah, I was, before joining the Foundation, as you said, I was for over three decades with the United Nations. So maybe I'll go back to that experience a little bit. Because there was a lot of work to be done. Frankly, the UN has a very strong agenda for gender equality. But like any large organization, it is defined by established power structures. My experience of trying to promote inclusion in general -- it goes beyond gender equality is really inclusion of all the voices of people who before, we're not necessarily listened to, or heard or given or empowered -- is that you have, you have to break down those power structures.
I'll just give you one example when, in my previous work as Head of Conference Management, it was a huge, huge division in in the UN Office of Geneva of 600 people, I decided to launch an innovation team. It was very simple. I just launched a call for volunteers for people who would want to join the innovation team. And the incentives were that they would be given half a day, every week to do what they wanted, as part of that team. As long as you know, they were developing solutions for things that were relevant to our work. It was a completely flat structure, that innovation team. So there was no hierarchy whatsoever. The first year that I launched it, I had 11 volunteers and 10 of them were women. The lesson I drew from it is that you really need to give a space for people which is free of the established hierarchy, which always by nature -- and it's not about the UN -- will always favor the people who already have the the authority and the power. So you have to create spaces free of that so that people's voices can be lifted up.
And it was amazing. That team was amazing. These women did amazing things! And at all levels they were in the UN, they are categorized as general service professionals, directors so that people from all levels join. And they did amazing things because they had the opportunity to reveal talents that were maybe not recognized or necessary in their established position. So for me, it's really about breaking the power structure, flattening hierarchies, and lifting the voices of people. And it's easier said than done. But that was my experience at UNOG.
Hannah Reinl
I made a lot of mental earmarks with everything that you said. The key takeaway really is for all of us to realize that power asymmetries and unequal structures that exist outside of the workplace, absolutely permeate the workplace as well. And that if we want to see real change, real transformation, we have to empower the employees to challenge, to recognize these power structures, and then also to rectify them. So this was really a key, baseline or condition for creating more inclusive workplaces. And now, maybe from the more inside look, to zooming out to the global level. Karen, you're a program officer at the Kofi Annan Foundation. I would love to hear from you how you approach gender equality issues through your programmatic work, and if you want to share an example, or two from the work of the Kofi Annan Foundation.
Karen Zamberia
The Foundation seeks to engage with and address issues of gender equality in politics, and more specifically, violence against women in politics. Now, promoting gender equality requires a multifaceted approach that involves collaboration and coordination between various stakeholders, including governments, civil society, international organisations, the media and the private sector. To put this in context, in reality, women still continue to face many obstacles to discourage or remove them from political life. And among these obstacles is violence against women in politics, being one of the most devastating.
In Africa, for instance, death threats, rape threats, threats of beating or abduction online, targeting female politicians are rife. And these are particularly so in the Kenyan context, which is one of the countries that the foundation has been working on. So in the lead up to the last year's general elections, presidential candidates and members of political parties were to meet and commit to a set of pre-election pledges. These pledges spoke to real world activities and responsibilities of politicians and their supporters, for example, how to behave at rallies. They addressed a vote of bribery and other forms of vote rigging or even mobilizing youth to engage in that violence on the ground. However, these pledges did not include how candidates and parties conduct themselves and their campaigns online.
It is in this political climate that the Foundation and our local implementing partner, the Center for Multiparty Democracy or CMD Kenya, hosted a series of consultative engagements on threats to the elections. And these consultations included key groups such as the women and youth leagues for various political parties, women community leaders, civil society organizations, government authorities and the media. Now, major challenges identified were the online behavior and actions of candidates and political parties, including the creation, or dissemination of disinformation and hateful content, coordinated attacks on the credibility and dignity of female political candidates, and gender-based online violence against these female candidates. So in the absence of gatekeeping procedures to ensure that online information is safe, before it was released into the digital world, online platforms became fertile grounds for online violence against women, necessitating the need for the development of a gender sensitive digital pledge, or code of conduct for online behavior.
So after the consultative process, we identified a few short points, which we hope to drastically affect the atmosphere in which the elections took place. And key among these points was that political party members and candidates seeking office were to commit to avoiding the dissemination of hate speech or violent rhetoric, particularly content that promotes violence against women, and the exclusion from elections. Despite there being significant progress and the increase in the number of female politicians voted into office this past election in Kenya, online, gender-based violence remained a prevalent phenomenon. But political goodwill is vital in ensuring that there are significant repercussions for online misbehavior, especially in the absence of the necessary mechanisms within political parties that could deter party members from engaging in toxic online behavior.
What all this tells us really is that the broad stakeholder stakeholder engagements we have ensured that the pledge was indeed adequately tailored to the specific Kenyan context. And it was intended to preempt phenomena which in the end did manifest in the digital space. We are really yet to fully understand the full extent of the digital threats that pervaded that election. However, it is there is no disputing the merits of this digital pledge, and its potential to mitigate digital threats to electoral integrity in Kenya, it remains a valid document and with political goodwill among relevant actors in the country, it could still go a long way in ensuring that women can participate in politics, free of intimidation, free from discrimination, and threats of violence.
Hannah Reinl
Thank you for sharing this. It sounds like a story of success from your work, and something that hopefully will inspire other champions and other institutions to take action. I think it's also a powerful reminder of the pervasiveness of gender based violence, that doesn't stop with the online space. And this is something that we from the International gender champions will also be looking more and more at the upcoming year. So we should probably talk more. We have to come to an end already. But before finishing, I would like to ask both of you, if you could pass on one key learning from your work on gender equality, whether it's at the corporate or at the programmatic level, what is it that you would want to share with our IGC community?
Corinne Momal-Vanian
I would say that, I mean, maybe I'll give two key key learnings. One is the one I referred to before is you have to find ways to elevate the voices of people who are often on the margin. So we there is there has been a lot of progress in increasing the numbers of women in organisations. The reality is that the decision-making structures are still often excluding women or young people, for instance. We also work at the Foundation a lot on the inclusion of young people. There's just too much tokenism. So one thingis the numbers are not enough, you have to really penetrate the decision making and power structures. And that's much harder. That's much harder.
And the second message is, one easy way to promote inclusion is flexibility in the workplace. And that's something that thank God, I've seen so much progress in many organisations, including our own at the Foundation since since COVID. If there was one benefit from COVID, it is that it's just too difficult for managers now to say no to remote work. I spent the last 10 years of my life at the UN telling people the you know the key factor to promoting the career of young women in a bureaucracy is to increase the flexibility, the remote work the flexible times, and so on. And there was so much resistance. I'm just so happy that this resistance seems finally to have been broken.
Hannah Reinl
Right? So I'm hearing elevating voices, avoiding tokenism and promoting flexibility. What about you, Karen?
Karen Zamberia
I'd say one key learning that I would like to share with the International Gender Champions community is the importance of empathetic leadership in understanding and acknowledging the experiences and perspectives of others, particularly those who are marginalized or underrepresented. No one will be better equipped to design and implement programs that address the root causes of gender inequality and ensure that programs are inclusive and responsive to the needs of local communities. From our experience in Kenya, have seen that it can also help to build trust and foster meaningful relationships with stakeholders, including beneficiaries and local partners. So this can lead to more effective collaborations, increased engagement, and much better outcomes for programs.
Hannah Reinl
Both of you, thank you for talking to me today. Here's to thinking gender in the small worlds the big worlds, also the medium sized worlds. I'm really glad you joined me today.
Corinne Momal-Vanian
Thank you, Hannah. Pleasure to be here.
Karen Zamberia
Thank you, Hannah.