Facilitating an NHRI Gender Audit A Gender Audit will provide your NHRI with the opportunity to increase its understanding of gender equality and to work across the organisation to strengthen its practices. The purpose of the NHRI Gender Audit is to: • Establish a baseline of information against which progress can be compared • Identify what your NHRI does well and what it could be doing better • Recommend strategies and activities to address the gaps • Share and document good practices across the organisation, and • Strengthen the capacity of your NHRI to apply a gender perspective to your activities and to your internal policies and practices 0.3 Who is the Toolkit for? Leaders of NHRIs—Ombudspersons, Chairpersons/Presidents, Commissioners, Senior Executive Officers and Senior Managers—are responsible for initiating and supervising its gender mainstreaming strategy. They are also responsible for initiating and overseeing your Gender Audit. A Gender Audit will likely result in recommendations that require a response from throughout your NHRI. As such, it is good to establish an audit team of people from across the divisions or departments within the NHRI and externals, if appropriate, to make the Gender Audit happen. While this Toolkit provides information for the leaders and staff of your NHRI, it has been developed as a step-by-step guide for the teams responsible for facilitating the Gender Audit. 0.4 How to use the Toolkit You can use the Toolkit as a downloadable resource or as a self-facilitated online resource as you work through the Gender Audit process. It includes examples and tools that follow the four stages of a Gender Audit (Fig 1) and aims to guide you through these stages. The Gender Audit is represented in a cycle to indicate that the process of recommending action and reviewing the outcomes is an ongoing one. The first Gender Audit will give you a baseline of the current situation. Subsequent audits will indicate any progress made Figure 1: The four stages of a Gender Audit Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Plan and design Carry out Analyse Recommend the audit the audit the results actions 09