By chibairo 24 April, 2015
For full report see https://www.worldpulse.com/en/community/groups/economic-empowerment-group/posts/36657#.VUI3-7_EWM8.email
Thirty participants, twenty seven women and three men from
Africa are cuurently attending a specialised training on Women’s Economic
Empowerment in Haifa Israel. The countries represented are Zimbabwe, Kenya,
Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania and South Sudan. The
training is organised by MASHAV’s Golda Meir Mount Carmel International
Training Centre (MCTC) in cooperation with UN Women East and Southern Africa
Regional Office (UN Women ESARO).
UN Women is the UN organisation dedicated to gender equality and
the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was
established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide.
Over the years, UN Women Eastern and Southern Africa Region
(ESARO) has designed economic empowerment and leadership programmes whose key
interventions will not only empower women and youth to access and control
economic assets, but also build their entrepreneurial capacities as leaders in
business, and bring women and youth to the forefront of agricultural
transformation, small and medium enterprise development, and trade.
Addressing gender equality and the empowerment of women, as well
as increasing attention to economic and social development strategies are
globally recognised as critical aspects of sustainable development. Women,
especially in rural areas play a critical role in economies and societies in
both developing and developed countries. Across the world, women have proven
their commitment and resourcefulness in finding or adapting to new ways to
improve their own lives, as well as those of their families and communities.
In several countries, small and medium enterprises owned by
women are growing at a faster pace than the economy as a whole and consequently
become a significant engine for job creation and growth.
At the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Summit in September
2010, countries committed themselves to ‘promoting small and medium-sized
enterprises through initiatives such as skills enhancement and technical
training programmes, vocational training and entrepreneurial skills development
as well as the promotion of financial services for micro, small-and
medium-sized enterprises.
However, female entrepreneurs tend to have smaller networks than
their male counterparts. Hence, it is necessary to create systems at the
national and local levels for information exchange, training and technical
advice and for assisting women in dealing with governments, donors and
international institutions.
While agriculture remains one of the main pillars of economy
within most developing countries, new forms of income and employment opportunities
have to be promoted. Encouraging agricultural based innovative ventures will
help the advancement of women in rural areas.
The cooperation between UN Women ESARO and MASHAV is
charged with historical significance, and cannot be understood in isolation
from the chronological relations between Israel and Africa, especially within
the frameworks of the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative and the African Union’s Agenda
2063. In light of this, UN Women ESARO can only be highly commended for
their transformational and thought leadership initiative, and for their ability
to take advantage of historical moments to push the women’s agenda to the
centre of this political organising. As Africa rises, women must surely rise
along.
Relations between Israel and Africa can be traced back to the
beginning of the African states' liberation from colonial rule in 1957-1960.
Israel was among the first countries to extend substantial assistance to the
newly independent and awakening countries through interventions in agriculture,
medicine and defence to infrastructural projects such as the construction of
airports, the establishment of shipping companies, educational and professional
training institutions, etc.
At another level, the UN ESARO’s initiatives fit well under the
ambit of fostering lasting peace and security initiatives on the African
continent, especially as their interventions aim at reducing poverty amongst
women, which is one of the causes of violence against women both in peace and
in conflict times. ESARO’s partnerships also facilitate the rise of peace and
security institutions in Africa, all adding up for cumulative processes towards
lasting positive peace. (Galtung: 2012) Both Galtung and Gandhi contend
that ending insecurities and conflict cannot be based on post-cold war concepts
of developing frameworks and infrastructure for wars, but rather by
non-violently resisting and eliminating the root causes of violence, and
structural differences between women and men are one of the major causes of
conflict and insecurities in Africa. (Gandhi in Galtung: 2012) Africa is rising
and doing so in a unique and human centred way. While the Western initiatives
after the Cold War focused on facilitating the growth of institutions for war
and strategic studies, a new wave of institutional development also supported
by UN Women focuses on peace building and conflict transformation institutions
well focused on redefining national security from state centricism to a focus
on human security. Rooted in the agenda for women’s rights,
ESARO’s initiatives
are backed by a rare epistemological standpoint that focuses more on finding
reflective, critical and lasting solutions to the factors currently holding back
the Africa continent’s growth.
In Kenya Esaro has built a similar partnership initiative
with Kenyatta University, leading to the establishment of the African Centre
for Transformative and Inclusive Leadership (ACTIL) in 2012. The ACTIL idea
came at a period when Africa was celebrating 50 years of its independence, the
discovery of more and more natural resources and the realisation for localising
the benefits of the continent’s natural resources. Alongside this excitement
was the a dialogue about the missing piece; the lack of equality between women
and men even in terms of access to and utilisation of resources, and also the
general lack of a transformative leadership crop as well as the rising military
coups, armed conflicts, disease, violence against women and poverty. This
practical reality provoked the idea of UN Women contributing to the emergence
of leaders who can take the rich resources that Africa has including its people
and use them to transform our societies to the level and vision that AU has
crafted where we want to be in 50 years’ time. UN Women ESARO was very clear
about this and thus chose to set up a centre of learning that can foster
dialogue among leaders about what needs to change and how women can be agents
of change alongside men. In UN Women ESARO’s conceptualisation and power
analytical framework leadership is about creating quality and influential
front-runners than just more followers - it is not about power over others but
more about power within moving from inside to touch and groom others and
transforming itself into power with others. The drivers of the ACTIL model of
leadership create an environment within which people can respect each other and
understand fundamental human rights and know that these are rights everybody in
our society is entitled to enjoy.
In Zimbabwe UN Women ESARO has introduced the ACTIL
Transformative Leadership model through its training of women parliamentarians
and women leaders from the political parties in collaboration with the UN Women
Country Office and the Parliament of Zimbabwe. This year the UN Women Country
Office is in turn partnering with the Institute of Peace, Leadership and
Governance at African University (IPLG-AU) to introduce this leadership
training model for women politician and young women for the next three years
until 2017 under the Norway funded Gender, Peace and Security project. In
addition to the training courses that will be offered, UN Women Zimbabwe will
support the setting up of a full-fledged Transformative Leadership Department
and at IPLG-AU to offer certificated courses on Transformative Leadership,
Conflict Analysis and Conflict Management for both elderly women and young
women.
Going forward, UN Women ESARO could make even more impact by
harnessing the support of the African Union Chairperson’s Special Envoy on
Women Peace and Security for the replication of similar initiatives in war torn
spaces like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia as a way of promoting
the right of women to benefit from land and other natural resources for their
economic empowerment and source of power and strength in the face of strife.
Regional Economic Commissions continent wide can also support this initiative
as a means of ensuring a uniform early warning framework for women across
Africa when women’s efforts to highlight the effects of poverty on their peace
and security are well coordinated and supported as part of the continent’s
agenda for sustainable peace. Well done Esaro, well done MASHAV!.
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