LAHORE – Gender Reform Action Plan’s (GRAP) Punjab chapter is holding a “Spring Festival” in Lahore College for Women University (LCWU) on Thursday (today) with Pakistan Today as its media partner. This festival is aimed at providing up-to-date knowledge to our future generation of efforts being made by Punjab government to address gender biases in the society and to develop alliances with the youth to take forward gender reforms.
PROFILE: GRAP has been working as a flagship initiative of t he Punjab government, working on gender reforms in Punjab with special focus on betterment and development of women.
GRAP has been in active operation since 2006 and during this period, it has made various headways on this otherwise difficult and time-consuming process of social change from gender perspective. GRAP’s focus has been on women’s political participation, institutional restructuring, women public sector employment and fiscal and policy reforms. In order to implement this broad reforms’ agenda, GRAP Punjab has successfully established and maintained its Gender Mainstreaming Units in eight provincial line departments, Gender Support Units in all districts of Punjab and Career Development Centers in five public sector universities.
GRAP works towards changing the thinking of people towards marginalized segments of the society. These attitudes are shaped over a long time and take long time to change. In order to convince people that there is strong need to change, the focus of GRAP has been on creating awareness among people. GRAP Punjab has conducted almost 700 hundred workshops and seminars with around 40,000 participants from government departments and universities.
In addition to the above GRAP Punjab has also worked towards reviewing policy-making processes at both provincial and local level and has facilitated moves towards implementation of 5 percent quota for women in public offices and Protection of Women Act 2010. Steps have also been taken to institutionalize gender mainstreaming in public sector through review of key development practices such as reviews of PC-Is of project, providing recommendations to the concerned authorities and following up for tracking implementation.
All has not been easy for GRAP and one of the major difficulties has been to counter gender biases entrenched in public sector which are resistant to change.
