South Asian Gender Alliance

Our Vision:
SAGA visualizes a gender just society, which upholds human dignity where women and men live in peace and harmony based on the principles of equality and democracy.
Our Mission:
SAGA commits to address gender violence, discrimination and marginalization by mainstreaming gender at all levels to ensure a gender just society.
Strategic Goals
1. Mainstreaming gender within the partner organizations of Norwegian Church Aid (NCA)
2. Socio-economic and political empowerment of the marginalized
3. Cooperation and collaboration with other networks in the region as well as NCA's sister organizations CA & DA in mainstreaming gender
4. Lobby and influence staff members and policy and decision makers in the respective organizations for social un-conditioning of mindset of women staff and change in the attitude of the men staff members
Objectives:
1. To facilitate the formulation and application of gender policy in partner organizations and effectively follow it up
2. To bridge the gap between the required capacity and existing potentialities of partner organizations on issues like gender violence, HIV/AIDS,etc
3. To promote regular constructive exchange of information, views and ideas among the alliance members
4. To facilitate competence of member organizations to play an active role in advocacy and lobbying on issues related to gender
5. To update resource sharing partners on emerging trends in gender and development
6. To express solidarity among the members to take collective action and strengthen the network, networking and broad based alliance building.
Our History:
Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) in collaboration with its partners in Asia organized an International Workshop on Gender and Development from 22 to 27 February 1999 in Chennai, India. The workshop was a part of an initiative to sensitize partners on Gender Planning Framework and to develop and strengthen gender perspectives.

The participants recommended that there should be a follow-up workshop to review the implementation of the Action Plan proposed at the Chennai workshop. This led to the Follow-up workshop in Dhulikhel, Nepal for NCA's Partner's representatives of India, Bangladesh and Nepal from 14 to 16 October 2000.

During this workshop, a Gender and Empowerment Assessment Tool was field-tested and the participants agreed on developing this tool further. At the concluding session of the workshop, a Regional Consortium on Gender and Development was formed in order to take forward the issues related to gender with joint ownership.

The first Regional Consortium Meeting was held in Rangpur, Bangladesh from 28 - 30 September 2001. At the end of this meeting it was unanimously decided to name the consortium as SAGA - South Asian Gender Alliance.