Course helps women to help their community
Two Papua New Guinea women participated in a leadership programme in Samoa recently.
Lilly Be’Soer and Sina Joe from Voice of Change took part in the five-day programme that was designed to give communities skills and leadership needed to positively change lives.
“I learned a lot about what others are doing in a similar field as we are working, so I take all this with me so we can stay connected and continue to share our experiences with each other,” said Be’Soer, a team leader for Voice of Change.
“It made us look deeper into how we can incorporate, add value and adopt new tools in the way we work with our communities.”
Two master facilitators travelled from the United Kingdom and Peru to lead the activities that involved conversations, creativities and plays, facilitation practice and peer-to-peer learning.
Participants were shown ways in which they could help their communities with youth employment, sustainable tourism, new ways of farming and other interests.
One of the organisers said that he was excited for those who attended the programme and was eager to see how the participant would do in their countries.
“The aim is to share knowledge with a cross-section of people working with the communities in the hope that it will translate into meaningful actions and positive changes,” Alatina Ioelu from small Business Enterprise Centre Samoa said.
The people who took part received certificates as facilitators and that would enable them to teach modules and methodologies to their own communities to create social change-makers, known as active citizens.
Samoa was the 52nd country to host the programme and the participants were from Tonga, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa and the Solomon Islands.
The programme will be monitored over the next nine months and the success will be measured on the social actions and social enterprises developed by active citizens trained by the facilitators.