A male champion for gender equality

Posted in : Blog on 3 March 2025

Assefa Gudina is blunt when it comes to describing why he joined CIWA’s new Male Champions for Women’s Empowerment initiative. “Leaving half of society out and discouraging them and their participation is a crime.”

In the male-dominated transboundary water sector, men who support gender equality are well-positioned to challenge cultural norms about gender roles and advocate with other men to advance women’s equality and empowerment in water resources institutions.

That is precisely what the new CIWA initiative seeks to do. It has recruited a group of Male Champions to take actions individually and collectively to spark a reduction in gender inequalities and an increase in women’s participation in decision making on WRM.

“Unless males encourage the empowerment of women, the issue of gender will continue as a business-as-usual scenario,” says Gudina, 48, ENTRO’s regional social and environment officer and gender focal point.

“The Male Champions initiative is a very powerful effort to empower women,” he says. “If I as a male talk with another male, the acceptance is more. He can bring about change.” But, Gudina adds, it’s important for Male Champions to ensure that their advocacy of gender equality doesn’t become “another form of male dominance.”

Building on progress in the Nile Basin

Gudina says that ENTRO and NBI are more advanced on GESI issues than other workplaces he has experienced. He said that while other organizations have gender plans, “there is always failure in implementation because of the lack of commitment by decision makers” to find the budget resources, allocate staff time, and conduct monitoring and evaluation activities.

For example, he says, gender is rarely considered in procurement for goods and services or in hiring processes and decisions because of a lack of policies, strategies, and directives. Gudina adds that organizations need to do more to create working conditions that are attractive to women, such as having onsite childcare and dedicated spaces for breastfeeding.

“Whenever it came to gender issues, putting women aside was very common,” says Gudina, who lives in Addis Ababa with his wife, two daughters, and son.

But at NBI and ENTRO, he says, “the commitment of management is very good,” including allocating budgets for gender-related activities and conducting gender training. They are also supporting his proposal to hold a gender forum for eastern Nile countries. The NBI has shifted from a gender-neutral approach to paying close attention to the challenges facing women and girls by mainstreaming gender into its structures, programming, and processes.

“The vision of NBI is to achieve sustainable social and economic development and to benefit from common water resources,” he says. “Unless we encourage men and women, boys and girls, to participate, we cannot achieve sustainability.”

It’s critical to bring others along in the journey toward gender equality. The need is great throughout the region.

“Experts and team leaders working in water-related sectors in Eastern Nile countries have little-to-no understanding of NBI’s gender mainstreaming policy and strategy, only a basic understanding of gender equality, and knowledge gaps on gender-responsive planning and mainstreaming,” Gudina explains.

CIWA has conducted two GESI training sessions for 30 people in the Nile region to begin to close those gaps and mainstream GESI throughout the organizations and projects it supports. Gudina’s role as a Male Champion and gender focal point motivated him to approach CIWA to conduct a training.

Advocating for women at home and in the workplace

Gudina says it’s important for men to encourage women to participate in, and speak up at, meetings and to advance women through the ranks of an organization.

“As a Male Champion, you look around and see where are the women in the meeting? How many of them? Are they powerful? At what decision level? I have to tell them they must be very strong.”

“Women are our wives, our mothers, our daughters, our sisters,” he says. “They should be treated equally. I am encouraging my daughters to be in the front, to do their best to be future leaders.”