Consultant – Review and Updating Feminist Training Manual

Position: Consultant – Reviewing and Updating Feminist Training Manual

Location: Remote

Duration: 04 weeks from contracting

Reports to: Regional Consortium Coordinator

Deadline for application: April 03 2025, 11:59pm

Introduction:

The Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) Network is seeking a consultant to review and update its Feminist Training Manual developed in 2022 under the We Cannot Wait Project (WCW). The manual aims to strengthen the capacity of women’s rights-based organizations, groups, and activists in the Greater Horn of Africa (GHoA) by providing guidance on movement building, leadership, advocacy, legal pluralism, gender budgeting, monitoring and evaluation, and self-care.

Given the evolving socio-political, economic, and feminist organizing landscape in the Horn of Africa, where SIHA Network operates, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland, SIHA seeks to update the manual to reflect contemporary challenges, emerging advocacy strategies, and best practices. The revised manual will ensure relevance, contemporality, accessibility, and effectiveness for women’s rights organizations and activists engaging in movement-building efforts.

Objective of the Consultancy

The main objective of this consultancy is to review and update the Feminist Training Manual to:

• Align the manual with the current socio-political context and feminist movement-building needs in the Greater Horn of Africa.
• Strengthen its applicability for training women’s rights organizations and activists.
• Incorporate emerging feminist advocacy approaches, legal frameworks, and intersectional perspectives.
• Ensure the manual is accessible, inclusive, and adaptable for different training contexts, including considerations for people living with disabilities.

Scope of work

The consultant will be responsible for:

• Conducting a comprehensive review of the existing manual, identifying gaps and outdated content.
• Consulting with SIHA staff, feminist activists and key stakeholders to gather insights on priority areas for revision.
• Updating existing modules and developing new content where necessary. The existing modules in the training manual are:
  • Module 1: Contextual Analysis: Contextual overview of women’s rights and gender equality in the Greater Horn of Africa (GoHA).
  • Module 2: Leadership: Importance of Feminist transformative, barriers to women’s leadership, and the importance of building accountable leadership for effective advocacy.
  • Module 3: Advocacy: focus on advocacy and its roles in systemic change. Strategies for policy influence, coalition-building, and digital activism.
  • Module 4: Legal Pluralism and International Frameworks: Assessing the concept of legal pluralism and it constraints for gender equality; looking at the various regional and international treaties promoting women’s rights; role of the State and external factors such as recurring conflict, instability, and the effect on women’s status; and review of regional and global platforms in promoting women’s rights.
  • Module 5: Gender Budgeting: Facilitating discussion on gender budgeting as a vital tool for realizing women’s rights and gender equality through national policy.
  • Module 6: Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL): Enhancing the importance of tracking the progress of advocacy initiatives and the need to provide an accessible tool for documenting knowledge.
  • Module 7: Self and Collective Care: Intended to create a culture that prioritizes self and collective well-being. The Module is designed to create space to discuss the individual and collective care needs for women engaged in the struggle for women’s rights and to identify strategies that support self and collective care needs.
• Ensuring the manual integrates relevant case studies, best practices, and lessons learned from SIHA’s work in the region.
• Strengthening inclusivity by incorporating perspectives and strategies for engaging people living with disabilities in feminist advocacy and movement building.
• Refining the training methodology, facilitation techniques, and participant engagement strategies.
• Producing a final, well-structured, and formatted version of the manual ready for use in training sessions.

Key deliverables

The consultant is expected to deliver:

1. Inception Report—outlining the work plan, methodology, and key focus areas for revision.
2. Draft of an updated manual, incorporating revisions based on desk review and consultations.
3. Final Updated Manual: integrating feedback from SIHA and stakeholders and meeting the current context of movement building
4. Summary Report: detailing key changes, justifications, and recommendations for future updates.