Accra and Amman, September 2021
Starting September 2021, the Academy launched its first set of activities, meant to target young women with few experience on Leadership and Empowerment. The first seminar was online, bringing together around 10 participants mainly from the Middle-East and North Africa. The seminar lasted three days, compiling team-building, introduction on Story-telling and Branding as well as a special meeting with a guest speaker to talk about election campaign advice. The second seminar held in Accra, Ghana, with a dozen of participants from West-Africa, was meant to provide the same technical knowledge as the previous one. During four days similar topics such as Branding and Story-telliing were introduced with a focus on the challenges that these young women experience in their region. The seminar closed with a conference inviting around 40 young people, men and women, interested in taking part in the matter. It was meant to bring more people together than the limited spots available for the seminar seeing the very successful call for participants.
The last seminar : “Coming together as Female Leaders”, held in the Dead Sea in Jordan was the closing seminar for this series of activities. Promising participants from both Ghana and Online seminars were invited in order for them to take the knowledge of their previous event and explore it further through practical activities. In this framework, alumnis of the Female Leadership Program were also invited to take part in the seminar as most of them had only grasped the concepts of empowerment, influencing, network, etc.
The seminar lasted four days, bringing together 12 participants through its entirety and 18 at its maximum most of them came from member organizations and the few that did not, got the opportunity to understand the advantages of being part of a member organization. The large diversity of participants provided the activities a wider spectrum of perspectives, sharing differences and similarities in challenges that they face coming from South-Africa, Azerbaijan or the Middle-East. Although no participants from the Ghanaian seminar were able to attend due to Visa problems, the seminar itself focused on a larger perspective than only the Middle-East due to the presence of Spanish, South Africans and one Azerbaijani.
As all of the participants had participated in previous activities, all of the workshops and sessions were tailored to former reports. The theoretical knowledge gained in previous seminars was used to build practical sessions around : public speaking ; how to create your personal brand and what tools to use ; Finding your leadership style ; Overcoming societal stigma. As the topic of mental health had been mentioned in previous evaluation forms, it was added to the agenda and moderated by psychologists. The concepts of Liberalism was also discussed through an academic lens inviting a panel of experts to open the conversation around what defines liberalism and how to promote it.
The high-level team was selected by the Pool of trainer manager to make sure everyone has a defined role and can be added-value to the event. It consisted of the Programme manager of the Female Leadership Program and a trainer, both had participated in the online seminar providing consistency in the content ; our President, also in charge of the course managing, to ensure the agenda fits overall with our values ; Two members of the office including the Executive Director, to take care of all the logistical aspects and connect IFLRY with the activities in the region.
The outcomes of the Academy itself were extremely successful, as there has already been two events in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where participants from the Ghanian seminar presented the workshops, the idea of liberalism in West-Africa, and the learnings that they received from the seminar. In Jordan, a group has been created with one of the panelists and our participants in order to further discuss the idea promoting liberalism in the region, this opportunity provides access to broader perspectives set by the seminar. Both of these actions are testimonies of the effective toolkit created during the academy.
Lastly, seeing the increasing interest in the program, the unfortunate refusal of many interested applicants, as well as the inevitable incidents leading some participants not to come, a booklet has been created compiling all the activities of the Academy, the main ideas and as a reflective tool even for those who have attended fully.