HIV and Gender Mainstreaming HIV and Gender Mainstreaming
In the last two years the Joint Office has been using the CAFOD HIV mainstreaming tool/ guidelines to promote HIV mainstreaming with partners. Levels of awareness and skills in HIV mainstreaming among the staff working at the Joint office of CAFOD/Trócaire/SCIAF and partner staff members were varied and additional efforts were needed to develop common understanding. Thus, the mainstreaming component of the HIV program of the Joint Office has a focus on providing capacity building training to staff and partners, coordinating and leading the HIV mainstreaming interventions while the relevant responsibilities are equally shared and assumed by all relevant programme and management staff.  

The Gender Audit conducted by the Joint Office recently revealed that there is considerable gap in knowledge, attitude and practice (skills) of gender mainstreaming among partners and the Joint Office staff. On the different aspects of the how the joint office and partner organizations can develop and deliver their programming and take up strategic entry points for gender mainstreaming the Gender Audit, among others, included the following Recommendations: 
•	With regards to commitment and accountability, there is a need to ensure that Gender mainstreaming should be one of the review parameters for review meetings so as to monitor the progress and identify gaps for intervention. 
•	Organizations who have integrated gender into their strategic plans should translate it into measurable operational plans. Moreover, organizational reports should incorporate progress and achievement of gender mainstreaming using measurable quantitative and qualitative data. Evidence of partners doing gender analyzes during project design shall be reported on.
•	In relation to Suitable Policies, Strategies, Tools and Guidelines, Policies and strategies must be formulated where they are not there; Simple and easy to understand gender mainstreaming tools, standards and guidelines must be developed, popularized and made available to users; Administrative manuals such as performance evaluation, job description and position description and staff selection should be gender sensitive.
Capacity of partners’ staff needs to be enhanced to enable them to undertake gender mainstreaming, they should receive appropriate training to ensure that their staff have the required information and analytical skills; Increase awareness of the importance and potential for increased effectiveness from gender mainstreaming by encouraging senior management participation in activities, such as capacity-building workshops and other activities; The Gender Focal Person should be encouraged to participate fully in decision making processes of gender mainstreaming activities and to assume leadership within the organizations in order to put in place the necessary mechanisms to carry out gender mainstreaming more systematically while in the long run Gender mainstreaming needs to be the responsibility of all relevant program staff. This may require more consistent capacity building of Gender Focal Persons to ensure that they have both the information and analytical skills to demonstrate the importance of this approach to implementing the organizations' mandates; 
Unlike the fact that most partners  have been involved in addressing the practical gender needs that focus on immediate and basic needs of men and women, the focus of the Joint Office will be on Strategic Gender Needs to address the following issues as far as the legal environment allows : interventions to changing the situation of marginalised men and women to reach social equality, addressing by consciousness raising, social mobilisation for gender equality reconstruction, addressing and challenging gender based power/control relations, involving  women and men as agents of change.

During 2009/10, a total of 88 Program staff members coming from 15 partners were given training on Gender and HIV mainstreaming in the four round training organised by the joint office using the CAFOD tool.  The first round training was facilitated to 13 partners included in the livelihood and HIV programs, which was given with the support of the CAFOD HIV corporate strategist. Some support was also obtained from CAFOD Gender Advisor in providing materials that were used in the training. Following that an additional two days training on HIV and Gender mainstreaming was given by the Joint Office HIV Program Officer to 4 partner organisations program staff including ADCS, WISE, OSRA and HUNDEE 

Similarly a two days training was also given to the Joint office program and Admin staff last year with the aim of building their capacity to push the HIV and Gender mainstreaming agenda within the Joint office and partner organisations’ program and internal organisational practices. Following that relevant staff members have conducted a series of discussions to refine the HIV and Gender outcome statement and develop output and outcome level indicators that would serve as a tool during the course of implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Consensus has also been reached that program leaders/focal persons will be responsible for following up the Gender and HIV mainstreaming activities within their program with occasional back stopping support form the HIV program Officer. To this end, activities included under this summary were planned by the HIV program Officer in consultation with relevant program staff members so as to enhance the capacity of partners to mainstream Gender and HIV.

Finally, a two day and half day, gender training has been organized at the office conducted by the CAFOD gender advisor and primarily building the gender related capacity and skills from the Ethiopia programme staff. 

Hence this PSGA aims to set aside particular budget to take forward some of the skill development needs from partner identified during the number of trainings carried out so far.