Politics of the possible

In 1995, Novib and a number of its partners initiated a courageous and risky journey; they undertook a collective learning and organisational change process to promote gender equality within their organisations. The programme was called the Gender Focus Programme. The Politics of the Possible is the story of the journey undertaken by seven NGO partners of Novib in South Asia and the Middle East. Today, a decade after the Beijing conference in 1995, it is hard to imagine that the process of gender mainstreaming and organisational change was uncharted territory when the GFP began. Thus the seven participating organisations, whose endeavours are the focus of this book, had to find their way using no more than an organisational development tool adapted for the programme.