Rights Awareness and Leadership Education
Regaining Strength, Stability, and Stature
We offer women a safe space to discuss their social, economic and political rights. Through this rights-based approach, women realize their value and their potential.
Sponsorship contributions also support a woman’s year-long participation in the Renewing Women’s Life Skills (ReneWLS) Program that provides her with rights awareness, leadership education and vocational and technical skills training. Through storytelling and workshops, we share knowledge with women about their worth and the importance of women’s roles and rights in society. The women form support groups to discuss issues such as the importance of education, voting rights, domestic violence and how to protect their health. Women from different religious or ethnic groups find common ground and often decide to pool resources to start businesses. Together, they actualize their rights and support one another.
Throughout her year in the program, she meets regularly with a group of approximately 20 women for rights awareness training sessions based on Women for Women International’s training manual, A Woman’s World. These meetings create a support network for women who may have lost everything during war and violence. Relying on her network becomes critical to a woman regaining control of her life after war.
When women develop and cultivate leadership skills, they gain power to actively participate in the reconstruction of their communities and build civil society. The rights-based education and leadership development program helps women understand their unique rights:
- politically, as victims of war and community violence and as a force to bring about stability;
- economically, in understanding their economic value to family and society; and
- socially, in acquiring skills to fight discrimination and domestic violence, and obtaining basic knowledge of human reproduction, nutrition, stress management, hygiene and the prevention and treatment of prevalent diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
We adapt our ReneWLS Program to be sensitive to the social, economic, political, cultural and religious context of each country. We offer additional services to meet local needs:
- Malaria prevention in Rwanda
- Trauma counseling to rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Outreach to victims of human trafficking in Kosovo
- Training in HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other disease prevention in Nigeria
- Voter registration and political education in Afghanistan
- Encouraging women’s collective action in Iraq
- Cultivating rural women leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina
