The Coral Triangle Center (CTC), joined a Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) workshop organized by the USAID Sustainable Fish Asia Program held in Bangkok, Thailand on September 26-28, 2023. The workshop gathered representatives from the Coral Triangle countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste as well to develop guidelines on how to address GESI issues in fisheries across the Indo-Pacific region that will benefit not only women, but also men, youth, the disabled, and marginalized social groups. These guidelines aim to support the achievement of the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security (CTI-CFF) Regional Plan of Action 2.0 and at the same time help close the gap in  to address some of the gaps in the lack of guidance and tools on how to integrate gender in the fisheries workplace across the region. 

CTC was represented in the workshop by Dr. Hesti Widodo, CTC Senior Program Manager and Kasman, CTC Marine and Fisheries Coordinator. During the workshop, the CTC team provided inputs in the development of the Gender Integration in Small Scale Fisheries in Southeast Asia Training Module as well as the CTI-CFF’s GESI Policy Implementing Guidelines. The workshop participants hope that with these guidelines in place, GESI principles will be implemented at all relevant levels by CTI-CFF, members and partners, in all of their programs and activities and that the CTI-CFF will be more sensitive and responsive to GESI issues in the region, and will have a deeper understanding of how the policies, practices and procedures can implement the GESI policy, and more importantly contribute to improving social inclusion in fisheries; and improve gender equity in fisheries, transform food systems for greater resiliency and equality, and ensure building back better. 

Following the workshop, the representatives of the CTI-CFF member countries also convened for the Women Leaders Forum working group meeting. In this meeting, the new chair and co-chair for 2023-2024 were elected for endorsement at the next CTI-CFF Senior Officials Meeting in November 2023. Solomon Islands was elected as the new WLF Chair and CTC was re-elected as the Co-Chair for a second consecutive term and will serve for another two years.  The current tenure of chair Timor Leste and co-chair CTC will end on December 31, 2023.