The Câmara de Lagos already has a Municipal Plan for Equality and Non-Discrimination, which will be very focused “on training and capacity building, both organizational and community”, announced the municipality.
The document, drawn up internally by the municipality's social services, in collaboration with partner entities of the Social Network of Lagos, was approved at the last meeting of the Lagos Council and will now be submitted to the Municipal Assembly for approval.
On the same occasion, the “Protocol of Cooperation for Equality and Non-Discrimination – New Generation” received the green light, to be celebrated between the municipality and the Commission for Citizenship and Equality (CIG).
«With a time horizon of four years (2020-2023), the Municipal Plan for Equality and Non-Discrimination in the Municipality of Lagos (PMIND/Lagos) establishes a set of actions to be developed, which are grouped around three major axes of intervention: the Promotion of Equality between Men and Women; Preventing and Combating Domestic Violence; Combating Discrimination on the Ground of Sexual Orientation, Identity, Gender Expression and Sexual Characteristics», described the City of Lagos.
The first axis, “Promotion of Equality between Men and Women”, foresees the appointment of municipal councilors for equality and the constitution of a “Team for Equality in Local Life”.
In the same context, 'information and training actions with families, training actions aimed at workers from the municipality, municipal companies, partner entities of the Social Network and the community in general, the creation or replication, at the organizational level, of initiatives that promote reconciliation as a condition for effective equality between men and women and the carrying out of actions on the promotion of gender equality and the fight against stereotypes in the school community, IPSS and sports and cultural leaders».
In the axis of preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, «the proposed strategy involves normalizing in the community a culture of non-violence and intolerance to all manifestations of violence, through the promotion of awareness-raising actions together the community in its various life cycles, the qualification of local intervention and the consolidation of the local response to support the victim».
«In Axis 3, the strategy and actions proposed in the plan have the general objective of promoting the deconstruction of homophobic, biphobic, transphobic and interphobic stereotypes. Combating bullying in the school environment and guaranteeing access to information and existing support services are two of the recommended measures," added the local authority in Lacobrigense.
To prepare the document, the municipal technicians carried out "an exhaustive work of contextualization, in terms of the legislative, political and conceptual framework, and, in a second phase, a diagnosis that allowed for the characterization of the situation and the current local reality with regard to the demographic and socioeconomic data, occurrences of domestic violence registered in the municipality and the composition of the municipality and third sector partner entities of the Social Network based in the municipality».
These data allowed «to complement the conclusions of the social diagnoses prepared in 2005, 2011 and 2015, which already identified this area as a priority for local social intervention and development».
«The PMIND/Lagos, in addition to being a strategic document, which allows the framing of the theme of Equality and Non-Discrimination as a mechanism for promoting social cohesion and a tool for reducing inequalities in the territory, intends to assume itself as an operational instrument that identify the strategic priorities of intervention, translating them into concrete, participated and shared activities», according to the City of Lagos.
The plan “will encompass actions of an organizational scope (intrainstitutional), actions in partnership (inter-institutional) and actions directed directly at the community (external component). In its implementation, the municipality can count on the collaboration and institutional framework of the Commission for Citizenship and Equality (CIG), which, under the “Protocol of Cooperation for Equality and Non-Discrimination – New Generation”, also approved at a meeting of Câmara, will provide technical support, training, informative and training material, information on available resources and financing, among other support».
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