Women leaders from different political parties in Ghana and the Organizers of the Meeting
Over a decade ago, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) in collaboration with Abantu for Development and Women in Broadcasting (WiB) commenced a training Programme, dubbed Women in Politics Training (WIPT). The objective of the organisers was to strengthen and deepen women’s political participation in the country, provide essential leadership skills for women and enhance their participation in socio-political discussions.
It is a nine-month of intensive training, structured into ten modules. Participants undergo a two-day training on selected modules over a weekend. An important benchmark of the training is team work, thus participants must necessarily work in teams throughout the training programme.
The programme has been designed to cover two broad areas, (1) Soft/Social Skills and (2) Factual knowledge. The modules include Leadership Skills, Presentation Skills, Negotiation Skills, Basic Social Research Skills, Media Relations Skills, Women and the Ghanaian Economy, Fundamentals of Ghana’s Democratic System, Ghana’s Law Making Process, Gender and Development and Campaigning and Lobbying.
Selection of participants is through the National Women Organisers’ of Political Parties as well as the Partner Organisations (ABANTU/WiB/FES). Since the commencement of the training, over 300 women have been trained from across the 10 regions in Ghana. This huge number of past trainees represents the alumni network of the training.
To provide a social networking platform, Alumni from various year groups are always invited to grace the graduation events of the graduating batch. This is to create a platform for social integration and networking. The organisers however realised that the One day’s social interaction was not yielding the desired result and to address this issue, it was decided to introduce an alumni residential session which will create an enabling environment to sufficiently interact and integrate amongst the year groups.
This thus led to the maiden WIPT Alumni Residential Workshop held at Volta Serene Hotel, Ho, from October 19 – 21, 2018.
Objectives
- To first and foremost bring the WIPT Alumni together in residence for a weekend for the first time since the commencement of the training.
- To get to appreciate and know each other, especially, from the various year groups, build an inter-year group network for sharing experiences and networking.
- To share experiences and current lines of work of the alumni for building synergies around common future interests and activities.
- To brainstorm on the way forward for an effective permanent alumni network