WOMENS LEARNING PARTNERSHIP FOR RIGHTS DEVELOPMENT AND PEACE LTD

Women's Learning Partnership (WLP) is dedicated to women's leadership and empowerment. Working in more than 20 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, WLP produces culture-specific curriculum in 20 languages and implements participatory leadership training to empower grassroots women. WLP's primary objectives are: a) to increase the number of women taking on decision-making roles at family, community, and national levels, and more importantly, to qualitatively change the practice of leadership, promoting decision-making styles that are participatory, inclusive, and dialogue-based, and b) to improve the effectiveness of women's organizations and feminist movements by strengthening the capacity of grassroots organizations.

WLP achieves its objectives through the following strategies and programmatic areas:
Curriculum Development and Training: We develop and implement participatory, inclusive, horizontal, and culture-specific leadership learning tools that foster women's agency and participation in the private and public spheres.Specific programs for women's empowerment we have developed or are in the process of jointly developing include participatory leadership, information and communication technologies (ICTs), political participation, organizational capacity building and evaluation, and advocacy against gender-based violence. Partner organizations help tailor each curriculum to the unique cultural context and translate it into the local language. Established and respected grassroots partner organizations implement our programs through workshops, training of trainers institutes, and online trainings such as eCourses and eIntensives in their settings with support from WLP. ; Capacity Building: WLP strengthens partners' existing organizational infrastructure through institutional development, evaluation system training, management skill building, and ICT development. We help national and regional partners to implement empowerment programs and assist in monitoring and reporting. We help partners build their fundraising capacity by establishing connections, providing information on potential funders, and creating platforms that raise the visibility of partners' work; and Advocacy and Networking: To ensure that we build strong civil societies guided by tolerant voices, we strategically position activists in networks to amplify moderate women's voices needed to help shift inequitable power distribution and advocate for women's rights and democracy. WLP helps strengthen the women's movement by connecting activists, networks, and movements that are not currently linked to each other. We also take on leadership roles to bridge women's rights networks with other relevant policy networks. It is important that grassroots women's organizations work autonomously in developing and implementing advocacy strategies in their settings. We increase the visibility of their diverse strategies and strengthen the movement by sharing knowledge of these strategies through the media, ICTs, translation of texts, and through international gatherings. Through our interactive conferences, alternative media, and web-based portal, we have become a place where activist and grassroots women connect as well as a space where South-South and South-North dialogue occurs.

WLP is totally unique among international human rights organizations in that we are operating exactly the sort of participatory, inclusive, learning model we espouse. Our unique partnership model allows organizations in different countries and regions to share knowledge and resources, and maximize their impact locally, nationally, and internationally. The WLP Partnership brings together women of different nationalities, races, religions, and socioeconomic classes to exchange information and strategies on advancing women's rights. The Partnership is based
on a relationship of intense and continuous communication and ongoing
cooperation in the conception, development, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of joint programs. Participation and mutual respect form the foundation of our interactions. The result is the production of dozens of culturally adapted and translated educational resources, international and regional peer to peer mentoring and support, South-South dialogues on best practices, and the utilization of the most cutting edge social networking strategies by grassroots women in the Global South. For us, the means is also a way to reach our end of empowering women to lead, in order to create a more just and equitable world.

Over the past fifteen years, we have trained more than 30,000 women, men, and youth (with a particular focus on women and girls) in participatory leadership and democratic participation, who have in turn reached hundreds of thousands of individuals in their families, neighborhoods, and workplaces; we have spearheaded advocacy campaigns, civic organizations, small businesses, and human rights reforms that have improved the lives of millions more. Through targeted capacity and skills building activities, WLP has enhanced women's and civil society organizations' institutional, strategic, and tactical capabilities to influence decision making at the international, regional, national, and community levels. Because of our work, the Partnership has become an internationally recognized force for freedom, equality, and democracy in societies that, culturally, remain rooted in nondemocratic systems and social norms. From the vantage point of 2017, current events that have shaken the foundations of global security and stretched international humanitarian aid to the breaking point have strongly influenced our own thinking about how we can have the greatest transformative impact over the next five years. We are excited about building on our past culture specific strategies to address pressing global needs among refugee communities, women victims of violence under discriminatory laws, and civil society organizations in the global south threatened by authoritarian rule and violent extremism.