Over the past two years, the MenCare campaign has made exciting strides with the development and launch of the MenCare 50/50 Commitment platform and produced the State of the World’s Fathers (SOWF) 2023 report, involving the most country partners in data collection yet. We established a new governance structure called the Partners’ Council in 2022 and hosted six MenCare webinars in 2023 covering the recommendations from SOWF. We also increasingly engaged with international platforms and agencies including Women Deliver, the Global Alliance for Care, the Inter-parliamentary Union (IPU), the WEF, and various UN entities.
In April 2024, we convened the second in-person Partners’ Council meeting in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The purpose of the meeting was to co-create a strategic vision and plan for the next four years of the campaign. We reflected on the current status of the campaign and thought creatively about the next phase in MenCare’s development.
The week’s activities included a smaller coordinators’ meeting and a larger Partners’ Council meeting. Some participants also joined the launch of a new report produced by Equimundo on navigating boyhood in Sub-Saharan Africa.
One major outcome of the council meeting was the decision to expand the MenCare co-coordination team beyond Equimundo and Sonke to a new larger coordination team, driven by regional lead organizations. Watch this space for more information on that soon!
Looking to the future, we discussed the new brand identity, worked with an expert from the Cape Town Graduate School of Business to gain more traction with the MenCare 50/50 Commitment, launched the new online partners’ discussion forum, and began preparations for the next State of the World’s Fathers report for 2025.
We asked participants from Equimundo, Sonke Gender Justice, AÇEV, Cultura Salud, Cómplices por La Igualdad, Centro Estudo Social (CES) Observatory on Masculinities, Oxfam America, Plan International, and Save the Children US to share what they value most about the campaign, and their responses ranged from the ethos of the campaign, to its objectives and achievements:
What do you value most about the MenCare campaign?
I value the MenCare campaign’s dedication to promoting involved, equitable, and nonviolent fatherhood and caregiving from a feminist standpoint, challenging traditional gender roles at the global level.
– Tatiana Moura, Centro Estudo Social (CES) Observatory on Masculinities
I value how the campaign puts the issue of co-responsibility at the center of care.
– Hugo Rochas, Complices por La Iguáldad and La Jugarreta
I value the capacity to bring research, stories of people, and policies in one place to tell a different story about what it could mean to be a male caregiver at home, at work, and in society.
– Sebastián Molano, Oxfam America
What I value most about the MenCare campaign is the horizontal work space that I could perceive on the part of the different partner organizations, in addition to the fact that the issue of masculinities and fatherhood is a topic that I am very passionate about, so I am very interested in maintaining a link with this campaign, since they are a benchmark in these issues.
– Marco Rojas, Plan International
I value working in a “collective” toward a higher goal: engaging men as fathers and caregivers to advance gender equality.
– Andrew Gleason, Save the Children US
I value the collective value that we assign towards this work on gender equality and the importance we assign to equipping men and boys as equal partners in building healthier and safer relationships.
– Diana Macauley, Sonke Gender Justice
When you speak with organizations that implement MenCare-related work it’s so clear that people are deeply passionate about the vision and values of the campaign. MenCare offers an important and positive point of convergence for a diverse range of actors. This convergence of commitment to the same cause is the aspect that I value the most.
– Wessel van den Berg, Equimundo
