G-HRT-005 Success Story

Project IP Name: Women Integrity for Society Empowerment Organization

Project Name: Policy Advocacy for Women’s Access to Economic Empowerment

Project ID: G-HRT-005

Date:  August 26, 2017

 

Together we can yield many results, however, in our work of the advocacy initiative, the outcome is considered as a tool that is benefiting women and girl’s rights and bring changes in policies and eradication of discrimination. The vision of the Project.

Policy Advocacy for Women’s Access to Economic Empowerment project was aimed to train women and young girls the advocacy skills and improve their capabilities through training, campaigns in order to enable them to implement their newly acquired advocacy skills.
The perspective of Project Beneficiaries before training

The beneficiaries undertook advocacy training and campaigns in Herat, Injil & Guzara districts. They didn’t know anything about the value of advocacy and even they were thinking that advocacy is solely a process to seek their engagement to all sectors, public and private, community stockholders to gather under one umbrella to adapt that there have been discriminations in hiring, retention, training projects for creation opportunity to people to live to a fuller life and fight against injustice with the government to the present social irregularity. As a result, these approaches that they had been using in Afghanistan without any clear picture of the advocacy strategy have continuously failed. The people of Afghanistan regretted the advocacies they had participated in. The reason behind this was a lack of understanding of the advocacy mechanisms and cycle of advocacy and proper advocacy methodologies to implement their advocacies upon a provision to subsequently endorse to an outstanding result to the benefit of all communities.
The perspective of beneficiaries After the training 
WISE Organization conducted five (5) comprehensive and very highly successful training for 120 women and girls in Herat-Injil and Guzara districts. The trainees became enthusiastic, motivated, gained passion about advocacy and changed their attitudes toward it, understood sufficient methods of advocacy, and came to know a lot about the cycle of advocacy that how advocacy can change the systems and policies and practice at the local and national or international level to change the situation for groups of individuals, community level, specific problems that are existing in the society to advocate through a proper mechanism of advocacy to be for the benefits of Community and government and create a win-win situation. It is worth mentioning that during the “Advance Policy Advocacy Training”, we interviewed some of the participants. They were saying that through training that they had received from WISE-Organization, we gained knowledge and indeed it is the grant itself that has enabled thousands of girls and women to turn knowledge into practical skills. However, WISE-O during its training paid remarkable attention to encourage provincial sub-coalitions members to adapt and implement advocacy awareness campaigns in their localities and interventions in their workplace.  As we need to sensitize the advocacy and since advocacy is the forefront of all issues related to access to rights, and once we sensitize them, we can also educate the nation. Thus, the benefits of a better society with the justice of the economic situation within the advocacy approach fulfill two fundamental objectives. First, through advocacy programs, we can reach a corner of the private sector that has often been ignored by the government, and secondly, raising advocacy awareness on policy advocacy to access to women economic empowerment can help enhance the empathy government to see the tough situation of Afghanistan people and improve the overall quality of advocates in doing advocacy in a standard manner. Thereby, having an impact not only on the advocates but the broader public as well.    
Project Aim:    
Whereas the aim of the training was to build the capacity of women and girls to improve their skills. Finally, we created provincial sub-coalition members who are twenty (20) educated and dedicated girls that have different skills and competencies as per requisite of provincial sub-coalition members to promote an integrated approach to enable them to work independently and equip them with skills to engage in advocacy meeting we are going with taking with six government entities. They will undertake professional advocates during these meetings. Therefore, these training were enumerated them to understand the overall cycle of advocacy for doing better advocacy both in their own or as a team in their areas for social improvement and bring change in the society.    
Impact:  the advocacy training changed the attitude of participants
The reason that I wrote this success story is that the advocacy training was very educative and interactive for them and 4 girls are voluntarily motivated to conduct 8 campaigns by themselves as for each girl two campaigns and one girl will take the responsibility to create a radio program, conduct citizenship interviews and invites law instructors and other youths to talk about advocacy. This program is being broadcasted through frequency (93.3) every Thursday from 11:00 AM to 12:00 AM and being repeated on Saturday at the same time. Till now two programs had been broadcasted and she is committed to conducting 10 programs solely to improve the level of awareness of the community about the importance of advocacy. Overall, they were impressive and enlightening workshops so we thought it worth to be mentioned in the success story since the participants were acknowledged and learned a lot from all these advocacy training programs. We, the WISE team were emboldened and encouraged by these results as the participants say they now better know the meaning of advocacy, realize that advocacy does not necessarily mean confronting the government, but rather trying to view an issue from their perspective and design solution(s) that has a win-win mood for all parties, so the level of awareness of people will improve and the government will also appreciate the Musharikat program.
Synergistic Benefits
“The value of this project has been much more than the value of the money given. We have been learned better what advocacy really means, that it doesn’t have to mean confrontation with the government, and how to do it. We have enhanced our reputation and also gained recognition of past work in promoting it which previously were not unnoticed”.   Naqib-Barakzay stated. Interview with Naqiba Barakzay- Journalist