We Met at Our Opening Meeting

We held the Inaugural Meeting of the European Union funded CEIDizler Project in Ankara on Wednesday, May 8, 2024.

In our Project Launch Event, where we came together with stakeholders from 11 project provinces, we both introduced the "Strengthening Participatory Democracy in Turkey: Gender Equality Monitoring Project" and discussed where we are in terms of gender equality. Emel Memiş, on behalf of the Gender Equality Monitoring Association, and First Undersecretary Odoardo Como, Head of the Cooperation Department, on behalf of the Delegation of the European Union to Turkey, made opening speeches. Following a short project introduction video on what we have been doing in Phase II of our project, CEİDizler Project Director Ülker Şener gave a comprehensive presentation on the third phase of our project. Şener emphasized that our CEİDizler project aims "to increase the capacities of civil society organizations to strengthen human rights, participatory democracy, and gender equality" and explained the reasons for developing a project on monitoring gender equality.

In the afternoon session of our meeting, moderated by Funda Şenol, we held our panel titled "Where are we in Gender Equality?" with Alev Özkazanç, İlknur Yüksel Kaptanoğlu and Çağla Karabağ. In our panel, Alev Özkazanç talked about current debates, trends, and conceptualizations in gender equality, emphasizing that there have been advances in gender equality, but there has been a slowdown in the pace of these advances and mentioned that the pandemic we have experienced in recent years threatens the achievements of the last 30 years regarding gender equality. Taking the floor immediately after Alev Özkazanç, İlknur Yüksel Kaptanoğlu gave important recommendations on how data-based advocacy can be used as a tool to achieve gender equality. Kaptanoğlu emphasized that data-based work is important in making inequality and discrimination visible and talked about current problems in data production. Afterwards, Çağla Karabağ talked about women directors and women's representation in cinema. Emphasizing the importance of a feminist perspective on cinema, Karabağ discussed the preconditions for calling a film a "women's film". After the questions and valuable contributions of our participants, our event ended.

Hope to see you at our different events. Stay tuned.