Gender – Family Department

About the Gender Secretariat, Seychelles

The National Gender Machinery is currently the Gender Secretariat, housed within the Research and Policy Planning Division of the Family Department, Ministry for Youth, Sports and Family, as the ministry holding the portfolio responsibility for gender. The role of the unit is to act as the permanent Lead Agency within the Gender Management System (GMS) with the goal of facilitating gender mainstreaming in all policies, programmes, and activities of the government, the private sector and civil society.

This will be done through:

promotion of women, men, boy and girl’s right and gender equality through advocacy, policy building and advice, facilitating capacity building and technical assistance.
facilitating dialogue and consensus between our various local and international partners.
leading and coordinating policies geared towards effective gender mainstreaming.

The various agendas of the secretariat are to improve the access of women and girls to leadership and in key decision making roles, empower women, men, boys and girls, eliminate gender-based violence and improve the correlative impact of climate change and gender. Since these are key influencers in achieving long term sustainable social change. Gender equality forms part of the broader commitment of the Seychelles to human rights and social justice as set.

The main functions of the Gender Secretariat:

To initiate, strengthen and institutionalise the GMS
To be responsible for the overall co-ordination and monitoring of the GMS
To play a strategic and catalytic advocacy role, by introducing critical gender concerns into the policies, plans, programmes at all levels
To develop national policy guidelines for gender mainstreaming
To ensure that key targets and indicators on the status of women and men are set, agreed upon and met
To lead the overall monitoring and evaluation of the impact of the gender mainstreaming process
To manage the flow of information on gender issues and communicating policy changes and results
To facilitate capacity building for gender mainstreaming
To coordinate the implementation of the National Gender Policy and Plan of Action

International Partners:

The Gender Secretariat works closely with both national and international partners to ensure that mainstreaming of gender are done across all sectors and Seychelles continues to report in its international commitments. The Unit works with Government agencies, private sectors and the NGOs and civil societies.

Some of our international partners are: SADC, COMESA, EU, UNECA, AFDB, AU, US Embassy, UN Women, COI, UNFPA, OECD etc…

International Reports:

Some of the reports that the Gender Secretariat continues to report on are the

African Gender Development index report
Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa
Seychelles progress report on the SADC Regional Strategy on Women, Peace and Security
SADC data tool
COMESA progress report on Gender Equality, Women empowerment, Social Development, and Implementation of Council Decisions
Gender Gap Analysis and country profile
Convention on the Elimination of Violence Against Women -CEDAW reporting
SADC Gender data collection

The main activities of the Gender Secretariat for 2023 will be to:

Review the National Gender Policy and Plan of Action
Undertake mainstreaming strategies through the commemoration of International activities focused on gender: orange day; International Women’s Day; International Men’s Day; 16 days of activism against gender based violence
Report on implementation of CEDAW
Revive the Gender Seychelles Website
Revive the National Gender Management Team to review and plan gender mainstreaming strategies
Strengthen the Gender Management Information System
Work with our international partners on national projects: Commonwealth; SADC; COMESA; UNECA;
Continued collaboration and support work alongside local and international partners.
Conduct research and collect data that can be further used during policy building and review process.

Some Gender Issues in Seychelles:

The most predominate and reoccurring issues in Seychelles relates specifically to domestic violence. According the Gender Based Violence (GBV) National Baseline study 2016 violence against women and men is a general violation of human rights and 58% of women and 43% of men have experienced some form of GBV of some form at least once in their lifetime. Hence to strategically eliminate that societal impact of GBV, some cumulative actions such as;

Education and sensitization in regards to family Interaction and coexistence. Better relationship can result in reduction in domestic violence or any type of gender oriented violence.
Promoting family values and collective legislations targeted towards gender mainstreaming in every aspect of society.
Educating and empowering young girls and women to become more independent economically.

Regional Hub for Gender:

Minister Zialor talks about Seychelles being a regional hub for gender-related matters, and this can further boost support from international partners to support gender matters in Seychelles.

The existence of a Gender Hub in Seychelles will deepen understanding of women’s economic empowerment through trade by fostering further research and data collection efforts. The Hub will serve as the information-sharing and knowledge-gathering platform where the latest findings of researchers and experts can be shared globally. It also aims to foster research partnerships, help gather research for easier access to experts’ findings, bring visibility to the work on trade and gender and promote the topic as a recognized field of research and expertise.

New Recruit –Senior Research Officer

We are very excited to welcome a new team member to gender secretariat! Please meet the new Senior research officer in the Research & Policy Planning Division of the Ministry. Mrs. Ikarakwu took office as of January 4th 2023, and She is based at the Oliaji Trade Centre in Victoria. She has an Honour Degree of Bachelor of Business Studies in Management. Prior to taking up this post, Mrs. Ikarakwu was the Principal Liaison Officer at the Ministry of Health. The Gender Secretariat can be reached through email; venessa.ikarakwu@gov.sc or jane.larue@gov.sc and telephone number 4397979