Mainstreaming Gender in Local Governance: A Global Initiative Led by CIB and Nexus
Inclusive governance begins with intentional design. One way to bring that design to life involves empowering local government associations (LGAs) to become champions for gender equality. Since late 2023, Nexus has supported the Capacity and Institution Building (CIB) Working Group of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) to develop practical tools that help LGAs mainstream gender in their operations and advocacy work.
With CIB’s global network stretching across Canada, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, the challenge was clear: how can LGAs better integrate gender into their core mandate and services?
Listening First: Understanding Needs and Gaps
The first step was rooted in dialogue. We conducted interviews with LGAs around the world to ask key questions, including:
What are their current efforts in gender mainstreaming?
What challenges are they facing?
What support do they need to do better?
What we found was promising: Many LGAs were already engaged in gender-related work. But much of it was happening in an ad hoc way, without clear frameworks, tools, or shared understanding. For example, how do we convince male-dominated leadership teams to prioritize gender equality? How can LGAs measure their progress? And are their internal operations truly reflecting the values they promote externally?
There was a need for structure, support, and leadership-level engagement.
Introducing the CIB Gender Mainstreaming Toolkit
In response, Nexus helped CIB launch a Gender Mainstreaming Toolkit, hosted on CIB’s Gender Knowledge Hub. This web-based resource includes five practical sections:
Getting Started
Measuring Gaps and Defining the Way Forward
Governance and Staff
Internal Operations
Going Further
Each section offers tools and guidance, sourced from global organizations, to help LGAs assess their current practices and take concrete action. We organized and contextualized the tools specifically for the municipal sector, which until now lacked sector-specific resources for gender advocacy.
To ensure relevance, we conducted validation sessions with LGAs, integrating their feedback to make the toolkit practical and applicable.
Building on Momentum: A Second Tool
The second phase of our work focused on another critical gap: advocacy. LGAs play a vital role in representing their members’ interests to national governments. But they lacked targeted tools to advocate for gender equality in local governance.
So we applied the same collaborative methodology (interviews, research, and validation) to co-create a new Gender Advocacy Tool. This resource helps LGAs navigate gender advocacy with clear definitions, planning strategies, implementation tips, and tools from a range of organizations. It’s designed to meet municipal needs directly.
From Tools to Champions
Having strong tools isn’t enough - they need to be used. That’s why the final piece of our project focused on dissemination and capacity building. Nexus and CIB supported the identification of gender champions within the local government sector, individuals committed to promoting and sharing the toolkits with colleagues and leadership teams.
In 2025, our work now continues with the development of support materials and coaching sessions to help these champions advocate for systemic change within their associations.
Shared Challenges, Shared Opportunities
While working with LGAs from Zambia to Canada, we were struck by a powerful insight: despite regional differences, the challenges around women’s participation and gender equity in local governance are remarkably similar. From the Global North to the Global South, gender mainstreaming remains a complex but important mission.
As Hadeel Khasawneh, our collaborator at Nexus, put it:
“It was an amazing opportunity to meet people from different parts of the word who share similar challenges in regard to inclusion and gender mainstreaming and are working in one spirit to find way to overcome these challenges.”
We’re proud to have played a part in building tools that not only raise awareness, but drive action.
Special thanks to Neila Akrimi and Gaby Seney, the two CIB chairs, and to Judith Geerling and Finn Speulman, from the CIB’s secretariat based in the Netherlands for their trust in Nexus. And to Hadeel Khasawneh, our collaborator at Nexus, for her leadership on this project.