Ngamane Karuaihe-Upi, also known as Uncle GEP, with GEP short for Gender Equality Practitioner, is a gender activist based in Namibia and he is one of the 30 participants who have been participating in our Women’s Health, Empowerment and Masculinities: Policy Advocacy Training, which is on its last day in Gaborone, Botswana, today (14 September 2016).
Reflecting on the last 14 days of the intensive two-week course, this is what Uncle GEP had to say: “They say evil will prevail for as long as good men sit back and watch from afar. Unfortunately, men are perpetrators of war, gender-based violence, crime, theft, and so on. But we have a duty to change that scenario around. A course like this is one of those instruments we can use to awaken men to say: ‘Wow! Gender equality is good for all.’ This course has exposed me to new concepts, like women have agency. This is a step in the right direction. The end of the course makes it real worthy. We got educated, we got trained… Now let’s go and practice what we have learned.”