Akash Sama­roo

Hazel Brown, Pa­tri­cia Mo­hammed and Gabrielle Ho­sein are some of the names syn­ony­mous with the fight against gen­der in­equal­i­ty. For decades, these women have ded­i­cat­ed their lives to gen­der jus­tice. But who will con­tin­ue their work? Who will be­come the next gen­er­a­tion of gen­der ad­vo­cates?

Well, UN­ESCO and the SHEroes foun­da­tion is seek­ing to en­sure that not on­ly the lega­cy con­tin­ues but grows. Im­por­tant work when con­sid­er­ing that over 60 per cent of the Caribbean’s pop­u­la­tion are peo­ple un­der the age of 30.

“With­in the frame­work of the Caribbean SHEroes Ini­tia­tive, we have con­duct­ed a se­ries of what we call SHEroes acad­e­mies which are in­ten­sive and in­ter­ac­tive train­ing ses­sions on gen­der equal­i­ty, ad­vo­ca­cy and de­vel­op­ment that are tar­get­ing youth across the re­gion,” ex­plained Paula Is­tur­iz Cavero, UN­ESCO’s Caribbean Pro­gramme Spe­cial­ist for So­cial and Hu­man Sci­ences and Gen­der Fo­cal Point.

Paula Isturiz Cavero

Shaunee Richards, a grad­u­ate of the acad­e­my in 2021, told Guardian Me­dia how in­te­gral that train­ing is for young peo­ple in­ter­est­ed in gen­der jus­tice.

“It’s im­por­tant that we don’t lose the tra­di­tion and the lega­cy that oth­ers have start­ed and it starts with build­ing our ca­pac­i­ty to con­tin­ue in this work, be­cause I think a lot of young peo­ple are in­ter­est­ed in so­cial jus­tice and gen­der equal­i­ty but it’s re­al­ly about be­ing in spaces where we can net­work with like-mind­ed peo­ple to ad­vance these goals,” Richards said.

Richards added that young peo­ple have a pow­er­ful tool that can take ad­vo­ca­cy and aware­ness to the next lev­el.

“I feel like so­cial me­dia gives every­one an equal play­ing field, every­one has a plat­form, ver­sus back in the day when you need­ed some sort of link to have your voice be heard, and one thing I re­mem­ber from do­ing SHEroes last year is that we had to de­sign a so­cial me­dia cam­paign and we got in­di­vid­ual feed­back, so the pro­gramme is re­al­ly prac­ti­cal,” Richards al­so not­ed.

Richards said the acad­e­my al­so fo­cused heav­i­ly on self-re­flec­tion.

Shaunee Richards

“Look­ing at who you are, your strengths, weak­ness­es, even your trig­gers and as­cer­tain­ing why you are ad­vo­cat­ing for a par­tic­u­lar is­sue, be­cause you can’t lose sight of the rea­son why you are do­ing this. It is not for pow­er, it is to im­pact your com­mu­ni­ty,” she said.

Mean­while, Cavero said for the 2021 acad­e­my, there were over 100 ap­pli­ca­tions.

“This shows that there is very good in­ter­est in ad­vo­ca­cy and gen­der equal­i­ty and what we found out is that we get very di­verse youth that are on the grass­roots lev­el and then we have youth who are at the pol­i­cy-mak­ing lev­el and we try to work with the dif­fer­ent lev­els so their skills and ca­pac­i­ties are en­hanced and then they are able to ef­fect change in their spaces,” she­said.

Cavero said they al­so try to en­cour­age men and boys to par­tic­i­pate, as they seek to tack­le harm­ful norms of mas­culin­i­ties.

“For men, there’s this idea of ex­er­cis­ing so­ci­etal ex­pec­ta­tions such as ex­pec­ta­tions to be bread­win­ners, be­ing tough and not ex­press­ing their emo­tions and this re­sults in high­er rates of sui­cides, homi­cides and ad­dic­tion among men,” she said.

Dur­ing the 16 days of ac­tivism, UN­ESCO will con­duct a se­ries of train­ing on gen­der equal­i­ty and trans­form­ing men­tal­i­ties for youth.