A dedicated Gender Mainstreaming, Public Participation and Social Impact Management (GPS) training for Suzhou and Huzhou authorities under the Lake Tai Water Pollution Treatment Project was successfully conducted at Lake Tai from 12 to 14 July.
More than 20 participants attended training activities including representatives from NDRC ICC, Suzhou and Huzhou Development and Reform Commission (DRC), Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB), Water Resources Bureau (WRB), Agriculture and Forestry Bureau and Women’s Federation in these two cities.
The three days intensive training provided a stress-free, lively, and interactive learning environment. The first day introduced the GPS basic concepts, the GPS definition, importance, procedures and methodology and key social development and gender issues in Nature Resource Management (NRM) and Environment Protection (EP) from Australian perspectives The second day focused on the GPS tools and methods through group discussion and role-play exercises. The last day implemented a field practice in a community to test the effectiveness of GPS theoretical learning in the past two days. The review of lesson learnt from the field experience was made.
Finally a summary meeting was held to discuss with the Lake Tai project major stakeholders about the strategies and procedures of GPS mainstreaming, the required policy support and the institutional coordination in the on-going and future Lake Tai water pollution projects.
One of the important outcomes from the training was the training manual of methods and approaches to public participation. It will be revised by incorporating the discussions and comments from the workshop and the training and also reflecting the respective responsibilities in water resource management of MEP, MWR and SFA. It will be broadly disseminated at the ‘ ACEDP Policy Consultation and GPS Project Outreach Workshop’ targeted the last week of October 2010.
All the relevant outputs including manuals, workshop reports and videos will be available at ACEDP ‘ Project Portal’ in due course.