*EPF508 08/15/2003
African Women Leaders Learning to Train Others to Lead
(Women are Africa's emerging leadership class) (1150)

By CHARLES W. COREY
Washington File Staff Correspondent

Easton, Maryland -- "Look up and follow the North Star" -- and use your positions of leadership to train others to lead so freedom, respect for human rights and democracy can flourish all across Africa, Dr. Josie Bass told eight women leaders from Rwanda and Kenya who were participating in a three week political empowerment workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Bass, who is founder of the ALVA Consortium and Candidacy School (that teaches the basics of running for elected officer), used the North Star analogy to remind her audience of Harriet Ross Tubman, who spent the decade before the American Civil War leading runaway slaves from the Southern states to freedom in the northern United States. Tubman also became famous for championing the rights of blacks and women in the later years of her life.

"Whenever she (Tubman) would go back from the North to the South to lead a new group out to freedom, oftentimes she was chased by slave catchers and would have to separate from her group. Because she traveled at night so there would be less chance of detection, she would tell the group as she separated from them to ����look up and follow the North Star' that would point the way to freedom.

Bass took time from conducting the empowerment seminar to speak with the Washington File and explain what her school is hoping to accomplish.

"What we are attempting to do in this curriculum design is to use some rather innovative candidacy techniques to impart basic lessons about leadership and essential leadership skills, including how to govern a board, how to govern a staff, how to impart ethics in leadership, understanding and using different styles of leadership. Indeed our theme is "Leading to Serve and Serving to Lead.'"

The idea, Bass recalled, is that those who participate in the program will become master trainers. "These ladies will be master trainers and they will go back in September to Kenya and Rwanda and train new recruits or new students in the skills that are essential for women leaders to possess. These new students will then go out to their communities and replicate that process. So, it is a very hands-on participatory curriculum."

Bass stressed that the women are being presented an "African American perspective on leadership" while they are in the United States for their three-week program, which began with one week of high-level meetings in Washington with a broad range of government and private sector leaders, followed by two weeks of intense training at a conference center outside Washington on Maryland's scenic Eastern Shore.

A host of eminent African American women authors have lectured the class, Bass explained, and the students "will leave with copies of those books and insights from those women who are in fact leaders in their own fields."

Asked why it is important to focus on promoting women leaders and how that links into Africa's economic development process, Bass said, "When you educate a woman you educate a nation. The motto of my company is 'Global Change Through Education.'

"In East Africa, because of a number of unfortunate occurrences, women are now more than 50% of the population in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. That says to me that they are the new and emerging leadership of Africa and that they must be equipped with the appropriate skills to lead in a democratic and civil society. And that cannot be left to chance!

"We have to give very specific training," Bass explained. "There has to be a mechanism in place and a support structure to ensure that these skills can be transferred and taken to the grass-roots level. To empower women, we are teaching them in the candidacy component of the school how to run for elected office and win, using some of the latest techniques in polling and campaigning, and we have reduced that to practical steps that are applicable to East Africa.

"Part of our success story in East Africa," she related, "is that when we did the very first inaugural class at Egerton University in Njoro, Kenya in September and October, at least 12 of the women ran for political office. To everyone's shock and amazement -- except mine and the women who ran -- six of them won their primary races in Kenya," she said.

Two of those women later went on to win their general elections, she added, and a third, because of her leadership skills and the positive publicity she received was appointed by Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki to serve as a member of parliament.

"So we have three graduates of the ALVA Consortium Leadership and Candidacy School seated in the new Kenyan government in the House of Parliament and one of them has recently been elevated to the cabinet as Assistant Minister of Gender, Spports and Culture, Alicien Jematia Ronoh Chelaite. So there has just been monumental change brought about by providing basic leadership skills."

Asked if she hopes to expand her seminar, Bass responded, "Yes! We truly hope to expand it all across Africa." Bass said her course is the first such leadership and candidacy program in all of Africa. "We have invitations to bring it to West Africa and Asia, but our first commitment is to the African diaspora," she pledged.

Asked how she came to develop such a program, Bass explained, "I conceived of this idea for this leadership school while in Africa doing a series of speaking engagements sponsored by the U.S. State Department. The first one was under USIA (United States Information Agency - which has since merged with the State Department) as it was known then and then later through the State Department as we now know it. Based on the responses I got to those small workshops and the request for more information, I realized that there was a pressing need for this. So I began to develop in my mind and between the visits the design for the school as it exists today."

Five workshop participants are from Kenya and three from Rwanda. The Kenyan participants were: Alicien Jematia Ronoh Chelaite, assistant Minister of Gender, Sports and Culture; Esther Keino, Member of Parliament; Katherine Moraa Nyamato, president and executive director of the Kenya League of Women Voters; Rose Aoko Ogwang Odhiambo, director Center for Women's Studies and Gender Analysis at Egerton University; and Joyce Laboso Abonyo, assistant dean of students, Center for Women Studies and Gender Analysis at Egerton University.

Rwanda was represented by: Ambassador Joy Mukanyange, director of the Consular Mission, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Christiane Kanzayire Ndahimana, president of Unity Club; and Leocadie Nahishakiye, director of the Women's Center, Kigali Institute of Science, Technology and Management (KIST).

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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