SHAPEDEM-EU releases Gender Equality Fellowship reports

From September 2023 to March 2024, the SHAPEDEM-EU project hosted six one-month Gender Equality Fellowships (GEFs) in Brussels, Belgium, to improve the flow of information between Brussels-based institutions and local civil societies on gender-related democracy support practices.

Coordinated by Justus-Liebig-University (JLU) together with the Carnegie Europe Foundation (CEF), the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum (EaP CSF) and the al-Kawakabi Democracy Transition Center (KADEM), the GEFs conducted their fellowships from a working desk at CEF in Brussels which enabled them to meet with stakeholders, research EU policies and approaches to gender equality in the Eastern and Southern Neighbourhoods. The fellows were compensated via scholarships funded by an in-kind contribution of JLU. At the conclusion of their fellowships, each of the GEFs submitted individual country reports on the conditions and circumstances of gender equality in the countries of Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine in the Eastern Neighbourhood and Lebanon, Palestine and Tunisia in the EU’s Southern Neighbourhood. The individual country reports and policy recommendations can be downloaded here.

The GEF framework was intended to grant young activists and scholars from the EU’s Neighbourhood an opportunity to meet and exchange with a fellow from another Neighbourhood country. In practice, this project activity was a challenging, enriching and insightful undertaking. On the one hand, the implementation of the Gender Equality Fellowships yielded dramatically different insights, producing contrasting recommendations for the EU and its stakeholders. Much of these points of distinction can be attributed to the policy frameworks for relations with the Eastern Neighbourhood, which are absent or less impactful in the Southern Neighbourhood. Another factor lies in the vastly different backgrounds and research areas of the fellows. This endeavour prioritised the inclusion of different perspectives over the homogeneity of research approaches. Hence, synthesising their content-related findings is challenging.

The SHAPEDEM-EU Gender Equality Fellowships added an immense value to the project partners and demonstrate the centrality of the issue of gender equality for the project’s ambitions. As a core task and output of SHAPEDEM-EU Work Package 7 “Academic Synthesis and Policy Recommendations”, the report on the GEFs (D7.7) submits a wealth of knowledge essential for the EU’s democracy support agenda in its Neighbourhoods. D7.7 in its full lenght is available here.