Développement international Desjardins's mission is to increase the economic autonomy of the world's underprivileged populations by giving them access to diversified and secure financial services. With this in mind, we fully support gender equality and empowering women and girls in all of our initiatives around the world. This is why we introduced an internal community of practice in 2016 to continually optimize the approaches and tools that we introduce and to ensure that gender equality is at the heart of everything we do.
Our community of practice, a learning environment that drives innovation, is a dynamic space that strengthens the capacity of experts working in our head office and in the field, promotes increased communication between our various projects to encourage the sharing of best practices and lessons learned, and moniters the strategies developed to support the economic autonomy of women.
Over the coming months, our community of practice will focus on several themes linked to gender equality including positive masculinity, female networks, joint decision-making, promoting gender equality with financial institutions, gender-based analysis plus (GBA+), intersectionality and inclusive language.
In addition, our community of practice conducted an internal survey to pinpoint where support is needed. The results will help us to implement tools to facilitate the integration of gender concerns across all of our initiatives.