Workshops

May 2007: WLP and our Nigeria partner BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights convened a National Training of Trainers Institute (TOT) in Paynesville, Liberia in May for 25 women in leadership positions at community-based organizations focusing on women’s issues.

In an effort to help their Liberian sisters after 14 years of civil war, BAOBAB worked, in cooperation with the National Women’s Commission of Liberia (NAWACOL) and the New African Research and Development Agency (NARDA) to hold this TOT for women participants who represented every county in Liberia.

April 2007: WLP Kazakhstan/Shymkent Women’s Resource Center convened a leadership workshop in Baku, Azerbaijan for seventeen women professionals, active in the socio-political life of Azerbaijan, as NGO leaders, union members, or members of political parties.

During the workshop, participants initiated a campaign to end early marriage and decided to focus their efforts on providing legal assistance to women affected. They also pledged to involve the media, educate the public, and work with parents to inform them about the issue. “I realized that it is necessary to change the laws that sanction and ignore the crimes against women,” explains one participant, Olga,* of the legal emphasis of the campaign.

October 2006: In Afghanistan, violence, especially against women, is on the rise, making it increasingly difficult for WLP Afghanistan/Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) to carry out their work. Despite the increasingly volatile situation, AIL held an evaluation workshop in the summer of 2006 for past leadership training participants.

During the evaluation workshop, participants commented that even though a year had passed since they took part in the training, they remembered everything they had learned because the training had a profound and lasting impact on their lives.

Eighteen women's rights activists created blogs, online petitions, and Facebook groups to promote their advocacy efforts on behalf of women's rights in Beirut, Lebanon. They learned these new technology skills at the National Institute for Training of Women Trainers in Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) for Social Change. The Institute was convened by WLP, in cooperation with WLP Lebanon/Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action (CRTD-A) in Beirut from December 9-12.

The new technology tools were extremely popular because they offer small, resource-strapped organizations the means to advocate for women's rights. One participant is now using her new skills to promote her women's cooperative products online. CRTD-A Information Technology (IT) co-coordinator, Lina Aboulhassan, has already started a blog to raise awareness of CRTD-A's latest activities at www.new-crtda.blogspot.com.

Participants, each of whom facilitated a session of the manual, learned how to use participatory training techniques to train others in ICT skills. CRTD-A Gender Program Coordinator, Roula Masri, facilitated a training session on social networking.

Women's Learning Partnership (WLP) and Fondo para el Desarollo de la Mujer (FODEM) convened the first Central America Regional Training of Trainers Institute for Women's Leadership from January 28th-February 1st in Managua, Nicaragua. The Institute brought together twenty-four participants from seven countries in the region: Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and El Salvador. Facilitators included Malena de Montis, founder and current Board member of FODEM; Sonia Morin and Luz Veronica Flores, members of FODEM’s training team; and Amina Lemrini of Association Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc (ADFM), WLP’s partner in Morocco.

FODEM held a book launch event on the first day to introduce Liderazgo Para La Toma De Decisiones, the spanish version of Leading to Choices: A Leadership Training Handbook for Women. Leading to Choices outlines WLP’s leadership concept which is participatory, horizontal, and dialogue-based, and is the foundation for workshops and Institutes.

Here are some examples of leadership training workshops that took place in 2005. These stories offer a sampling of the different themes present in WLP's leadership workshops.

Leadership Workshop in Mbouda, Cameroon, December 12-14, 2005
Thirty-two women and two men, predominantly engaged in small-scale subsistence farming, attended the workshop. They identified strategies for tackling the challenges they face in agricultural production, and decided to raise awareness in their communities about the rights of peasant farmers.

Leadership Workshop in Kaédi, Mauritania, November 9-11, 2005
Thirty leaders of women's rights organizations from each department of Kaédi, the capital of the remote Gorgol region, attended the workshop. Participants identified the need for stronger bonds of solidarity between women's organizations operating in the same region, and committed to forming a network, to be coordinated by WLP's Mauritanian partner.

In July 2007, in Jordan, three WLP alumnae won seats in their municipal councils. Additionally, two alumnae of a regional training in Africa have gone on to take leadership roles in NGOs and in civil service. Christiana Thorpe and Daphne Williams were appointed as National Electoral Commissioners of Sierra Leone in 2005 and 2006 respectively, with Ms. Thorpe gaining the distinction of being the first woman to hold that position in the country. Elections were held in Sierra Leone in August 2007, with run-off election results still pending, and Ms. Thorpe and Ms. Williams were key players in overseeing the process.