WILD convenes online meeting

In light of the Covid-19 global pandemic, Women’s Institute for Leadership Development (WILD) held an online inception meeting that was aimed at orienting and training Gender Champions on their roles in the community and on advocacy work.

Gender Champions were taken step by step through an advocacy process. Some of these steps included:

Identifying the advocacy issue

Gender Champions were urged to assist each other identify issues that they wish to be addressed in their communities. They should also discuss how much time they estimate the advocacy work will take.

Setting of Goals

Gender champions should then set goals and what they wish to achieve as a group. This gives the champions a lot more focus on the campaign.

Identifying the right audience

Gender Champions should identify the right audience or relevant authority who will directly assist in resolving their issue. This may include Ward Councillors, various government departments or the District Development authorities. Identifying the right authorities will save time and resources as their issue will have lower chances of being postponed or forwarded to other offices.

Evidence based advocacy

Gender champions were encouraged to adopt evidence-based advocacy which will further help their campaign.

Effective message delivery

Gender champions were taught on various methods of delivering their message to the authorities.

Gender champions also outlined the challenges that they usually face when trying to advocate for effective service delivery in their communities. These challenges included:

Opposition from the authorities

Women said community leaders always assume that everyone who confronts them is from a certain party and they rarely respond in a good manner. The champions were taught that they could overcome this by adopting a civil and calm dialogue.