This past 1-2 November, the UN Women Training Centre, in collaboration with UN Women Colombia Office delivered the face-to-face portion of a Gender Focal Points (GFP) training to 45 participants from the UN System and Local Coordination Teams in Colombia. This is the first national platform that is comprised of UN agencies, civil society and international NGOs working within the territory on gender issues. Through this training, the International Cooperation Working Group on Gender (MG, acronym in Spanish) and the Interagency Gender Group (GIG, acronym in Spanish) seek to strengthen the capacity of Local Coordination Teams on women's rights and gender equality and to enable follow-up actions and positioning the theme with different actors in the local context.

Specifically, the course aimed to address the following:

• Strengthen the basic knowledge on women's rights and gender equality within the Local Coordination Teams, which is the territorial presence of organizations.
• Build a proposal for a joint and inter-agency work plan that will allow follow-up with cross-cutting projects and projects with gender indicators for monitoring and evaluation.
• Strengthen the interagency team and the GFP network as a common platform for mainstreaming the gender perspective.
• Cooperate with the objective of raising the agendas of territorial work to topics of national interest through the link between the Local Coordination Teams and the GIG, with regards to gender equality and women's rights.
• Identify the difficulties or resistances faced by GFPs and provide tools and strategies to address them.

The course used a combination of online and face to face knowledge sharing methodologies to build GFPs capacities starting from their existing experience and serve as a refresher on gender mainstreaming. The course content explores key areas related to gender equality and the empowerment of women. It reviews gender mainstreaming tools, while addressing communication and advocacy tools to promote gender equality.

This specific version of the Empowering Gender Focal Points course, designed for the Colombia context, centered around two main issues: 1) Gender Equality in Humanitarian Action; and 2) Peace and Development. Some of the topics addressed throughout the training included: Change processes, world standards and commitments related to gender equality, the UN System and gender, Sustainable Development Goals and gender, violence against women and girls, among others. Further training for these Gender Focal Points is envisaged for 2017.

This training was based on the blended course Empowering UN System Gender Focal Points, one of many Customized Trainings offered by the Training Centre. This course aims to strengthen capacity of gender focal points (GFPs) in their specific role and functions in advancing gender equality within their own organizations. It also promotes the building of a community to encourage discussion and sharing of good practices.