Mexico City and Medellin recognised for women’s initiatives

Mexico City and Medellin have been awarded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for their efforts in supporting women’s leadership and political participation.

The award, Gobernarte (the art of governance), seeks to identify, reward, and document the most innovative practices implemented in various sectors of public administration at the sub-national level, in order to disseminate them and promote cooperation among the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Medellin’s city hall proposed a training model for women for political leadership roles. Last year the model was taken to a governance school, a school for gender equality.

“It is something that we are very proud of and we appreciate this award,” explained Gloria Gomez, Women’s Secretary, Medellin. “We have tried to take some power that has traditionally been exercised by men. We want women to have a role in the places where they live and work.”

With the IDB’s support Gomez hopes the programme to be replicated in other countries.

“This represents a recognition and a motivation to continue the task of closing the political gap between men and women,” Gomez told Cities Today. “In the same way, we hope that international cooperation agencies will be interested in this project, which allowed us to train with IAP methodology (Action Participation Research) more than 570 people last year (130 men and 440 women).”

Gomez said that 66 percent of grassroots women graduates turn into women that defend the rights of women and 60 percent have participated in the city’s participatory budget, which has led to US$3 million of funding to women’s issues over three years.

In Mexico City a programme was established that allows citizens to make proposals for the recovery and improvement of gender-sensitive public spaces, and also to encourage the participation of women.

“These are initiatives that are changing the way women interact with their cities, they are strengthening their roles as community leaders, as neighbours as citizens,” Ana Maria Rodriguez-Ortiz, Manager of Institutions for Development, IDB, told Cities Today during the bank’s Annual Meeting in Paraguay. “A jury of independent experts evaluated the initiatives and rated these aspects as the most important.”

Rodriguez-Ortiz added that it is in cities where she is seeing most innovation especially the big cities.

“We are seeing a lot of efforts from cities to become more inclusive and achieve better results for their citizens, where the lack of resources is overcome with innovation,” she said.

A total of 87 entries from sub-national governments from 13 countries of the region were received. Two panels of international experts evaluated and selected winning initiatives based on their impact, sustainability, innovation, and replicability.