Kerala Institute for Local Administration

KILA

22.09.2011

Today we had some interviews in the morning at the Corporation and district Panchayat then went to the Kerala Institute for Local Administration (KILA). We only found out we were going here an hour beforehand, and that we would be meeting the director to ask him questions about the organisation.

We were quite nervous as we had not been given notice so that we could do research on the organisation beforehand. He gave us a lot of information about the organisation which prompted a number of questions from us. KILA aim to develop and strengthen local governments. One means of achieving this is through providing training programmes for women representatives. This special training for women elected members comprises of an initial induction training programme and a leadership development training programme. This was a useful meeting and I learnt a lot from it, some of this information will also be helpful for our final report.

After this we went to Dr M Ratna Raj's office and he spoke to us about gender budgeting which is a tool that can be used to aid women’s empowerment. In order to do this the government is addressing gender issues through public expenditure. It must ensure it allocates certain amounts of the government’s budget to men, women and children to ensure gender equality. I now intend to do some further research on gender budgeting.

And these are the common types of spider in India (it looks a lot bigger in real life)…