Communication strategy: a tool for managing training and equity policies.

Tool.

ILO

2003

The effectiveness and outputs of social programmes are often affected by the lack or insufficient obtention of information by the concerned and target populations. This is why communication is one of the barriers to be avoided. Avoiding it implies to achieve an unambiguous and distinctive address and a visual identity that clearly identify the programme and its sponsoring agency. It also implies a promotional and communication strategy attuning the needs and interests of target populations with the programme's management objectives and modalities.

If the implementation of a Communication Strategy turns out to be essential in any type of intervention, it is even more so when the objective is to incorporate gender perspective to employment and training policies, as a condition to improve their quality, relevance and equity. Furthermore, challenges increase in number if the aim is to incorporate women under poverty and vulnerability conditions. To understand communication methods is to have access to cultural patterns, to get into the ways of "doing things" and "building meanings ". As a result, a close relationship exists between gender and communication: individuals are not only passive recipients of messages that determine their self-perception but also, simultaneously, they interpret them in an active way, they may accept, reject or reformulate them. Therefore, it is through new messages, directed to revise and question what is already established, that gender stereotypes and bias may be first identified and later modified.

Starting from this conviction, the FORMUJER Programme has drawn up its Communication Strategy, understood as a crosscutting component of its actions and a crucial tool for managing equity policies referred to training. This edition aims to critically look upon its implementation process at regional and national levels, to share the results, and to make available to governments, institutions and stakeholders the methodologies and communication materials developed.

English, Spanish.

Print, CD-ROM.

http://www.cinterfor.org.uy/public/english/region/ampro/c...