Earlier this year, to celebrate International Women’s Day, on 8 March, ILRI compiled twoWILD (Women-In-Livestock-Development) Pinterest Boards:

(1) Profiles of women at (or formerly with) ILRI

WILD: Women in Livestock Development (200 pins to date)

https://www.pinterest.com/susan_macmillan/wild-women-in-livestock-development/

(2) Profiles of women in related research and development work that have never worked for ILRI but that ILRI much admire:

WILD: Some of our favourite women heroes and partners 78 pins to date)

https://www.pinterest.com/susan_macmillan/wild-some-of-our-favourite-women-heroes-and-partne/

These women profiles generated much interest, particularly the second Pinterest Board of high-profile women we much admire.

We emailed links to the Pinterest Board to all the women profiled on the Board (when we had their email contacts); and we let the others know that we had included them on our Pinterest Board by tweeting to them on Twitter. The response from these famous, high-powered women was amazing. Everyone other than a handful (e.g., Mary Robinson, Margaret Kenyatta, Melinda Gates) responded by saying how thrilled they were to be included. Several treated our Pinterest Board rather like an award of some kind! That got us to thinking that we had here a group of highly influential women, many of them on the boundary of ILRI work, who seemed to be interested in continuing relations with ILRI. So we started dreaming up an idea for what ILRI could do with these women to celebrate International Women’s Day 2016.

An idea came up, that on International Women’s Day 2016 we could organize a high-profile meeting including the WILD women - and among them funders,  gender scientists, gender practitioners, policy makers, politicians etc - to discuss major issues in gender and livestock and related interventions. We could then prepare a project that combines the best ideas from the minds of all these great women and find funding opportunities.

This initiative makes our funding approach pro-active and participatory by involving a large set of stakeholders who are not on the receiving end of proposals, policy briefs etc...but are involved in the very identification of problems and interventions. We are excited to see this even happen!