Contribution by ICRAF

ICRAF is very grateful for the invitation and the excellent opportunity to learn about KARl's process, achievements and challenges in the area of incorporation of gender. We feel that KARl has made impressive progress and a definite achievement in articulating why gender matters for KARl and disseminating this message widely and effectively. It is obvious that scientists and regional centre directors are now aware and sensitised to the soundness of reaching and taking into account both genders at all stages of the research and development continuum. Congratulations. We perceived that the next stage of the process towards making KARl be a gender sensitive institution needs to come from the progress already achieved. Therefore, it seems to us that it is essential to now follow up with scientists and management at centre's level to listen to what it is that they need now to implement the gender lens into their work. The Gender Conference suggested a number of mechanisms, which might be adopted by the centres during those follow up discussions or refined, while other ideas and priorities might emerge from them. The ball has been set rolling, it is now time to allow and facilitate the taking over process. On the Gender Conference itself, we would like to compliment KARl on the well designed agenda, the excellent background materials provided, esp. with regards to the case studies, and on the good summaries provided along the way by the facilitators. We also very much appreciated the framework proposed to bring working group discussions into concrete proposals. We suggest, however, that this exercise might have taken slightly too long and went too far into implementation issues. The one other area where improvement could be gained relates to the presentation skills esp. on the case studies. Overall, the conference was very interesting, well thought of, timely and certainly effective in getting other institutions in Kenya, such as ICRAF, on board for future collaboration.