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Transforming Agency, Access, and Power: TAAP and inclusive approaches to education and leadership development

Tue, April 16, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview B

Proposal

In 2018, World Learning launched the TAAP Toolkit and Guide for Inclusive Development to support development practitioners, organizations, and policymakers with the integration of gender and social inclusion in their work. The TAAP approach is: 1) Universal - we work across all identities; 2) Intersectional - we understand that every person’s social identity contains multiple compounded layers and interact to confer advantage or disadvantage; and 3) Transformative - we recognize that transformative social change comes from working with both those who have and those who lack agency, access, and power. The TAAP toolkit contains an analytical framework, a set of five principles, and practical steps for integrating inclusive practices throughout a project cycle. World Learning has piloted and utilized the TAAP toolkit in several contexts including Jamaica, Moldova, Mongolia, and Pakistan to understand the power dynamics among program participants and transform discriminative social norms, promoting gender equality and social inclusion.

By using the TAAP approach, we learned that it is important to analyze and understand intersectionality and apply that lens to identify approaches that address power imbalances among various identity groups. This presentation explores the outcomes that were achieved in two of our programs upon integrating the TAAP approach and developing nuanced interventions that reach to those whose compounded identities exclude them from accessing education or participating in the social context.

In 2018, we implemented a participatory qualitative evaluation of World Learning’s Leaders Advancing Democracy (LEAD) program in Mongolia, funded by USAID, where our own project participants, in collaboration with our Monitoring and Evaluation team, framed, designed, implemented and reported the evaluation. We found that implementing TAAP in the project provided us with evidence base on the intersectionality of excluded identities and helped us to adapt our outreach strategies to include them in our program. We also learned that with an increased awareness and tools to promote social inclusion our participants adopt inclusive practices in their own work and leadership opportunities.

We also present the results of a 2018 case study from the “Pathways to Success” component of our USAID-funded Training for Pakistan project. The case study analyzed the women’s participation in the program as part of their lived experiences, within the wider contexts of gender and class-based disenfranchisement in Pakistan, the increased possibilities for young women’s inclusion in the workforce in a changing youth-driven economy, and the program’s efforts to further trainees’ education and facilitate their socioeconomic empowerment. The project employed the “intersectional” approach to gender and social inclusion in education, and the case study explore ways in which intersectional approaches lead to more lasting effects.

In the presentation, we will explore the following two critical questions:
- How can a targeted tool like TAAP ensure that gender and social inclusion is fully integrated throughout the project?
- How can TAAP’s focus on a structural and intersectional understanding of marginalization provide a useful framework for organizations working in complex social environments to bring about change?

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