Advanced Women's Rights/Human Rights Training
Central and East Africa

In 1999, WLDI launched the Advanced Human Rights Training for Women in Central and East Africa in partnership with Associates for Change (AFC), based in Uganda. The  participants in this program represented six countries: Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. They were carefully selected based on their experience, “multiplier” potential and their organizational capabilities. The core team of facilitators included WLDI Board members Florence Butegwa from Uganda and Helen Kijo-Bisimba from Tanzania, Nancy Flowers and me.
The first week-long training session was held in Entebbe, Uganda in July 1999. As in our other human rights training programs the introductory session provided participants with an initial overview of the main concepts to be covered during the program. Twenty-two women participated in the first training. The teams from Burundi, Ethiopia and Rwanda were particularly small, so a technical assistance team visited Ethiopia in December and formed a country team of six women, all of whom were prepared to attend the second training in March of 2000. Similar technical assistance trips were made to Rwanda and Burundi in January 2000.  In December 1999 and March 2000, on-site technical assistance was provided to the other county teams as well. The objective of these site visits was to provide guidance in the development of their advocacy strategies, to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each team, and to establish their particular training needs.
The second training took place in Entebbe, Uganda on March  2000. In preparation for this training, we analyzed participant evaluations from the first workshop as well as feedback received during technical assistance. The second training concentrated on honing participants' understanding of advocacy in relation to the issue they had selected. Following a brief review of the content covered in the first training, attention focused on refining the components of the advocacy strategies that participants had already assembled and their strategy implementation plans. Because all of the country teams were beginning the process of researching the problem they had identified, emphasis was also placed on understanding research as one part of a larger strategy​--not as a goal in and of itself.
In the interim between the next training session additional country-specific technical assistance followed, allowing participants to consolidate their teams. With support provided through the first two workshops, on-site technical assistance and regular correspondence, they began to implement their women's human rights advocacy strategies in every country.
​The final training workshop took place in Dar es Salaam in September, 2000.
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Issues and Strategies of the Country Teams.
Burundi
This team targeted women's inheritance rights. They began by researching the effect of customary inheritance laws on women and discovered that a proposal for a revised law allowing for greater gender equality in inheritance already existed. However, this draft  faced tremendous opposition from both men and women in rural areas. Therefore, the team concentrated their activities on sensitizing the rural populace on the negative repercussions that the current inheritance law has on women.
 
Ethiopia
Women street vendors are frequently harassed and attacked by police. This team designed a strategy to hold city administrators responsible for the provision of adequate market places where women vendors can sell their goods without police harassment. They worked on documenting cases of harassment and conducted workshops with the affected women.
Kenya
This team decided to design their advocacy strategy to raise public support and encourage the passage an Affirmative Action bill that had been recently presented to Parliament. They met with members of Parliament to build support for the bill which passed in the House in April 2000. The team then decided to research experiences with affirmative action in other countries in order to better respond to some of the controversy that was generated by the new bill. In addition, they collaborated with other women's organizations to develop a proposal to monitor the effective implementation of the bill.
Rwanda
With the high incidence of "unofficial" marriages in Rwanda leaving the women in these situations very vulnerable, this team chose to advocate for a new law to recognize different forms of monogamous marriage. They established an alliance with the Ministry for Gender and Women and with the support of the Ministry, they submitted a draft bill for consideration by the Parliament.
Tanzania
The objective of this team was to repeal the current discriminatory law on inheritance and replace it with one that would ensure equal inheritance rights for women and men. They worked to build a coalition with local human rights NGOs and organized workshops to sensitize women leaders in two regions of the country. They hoped to gather support from individuals, NGOs, and members of government and the private sector to encourage a change of the existing law.
Uganda
After holding a consultative meeting with other women's organizations, this team decided to advocate for a new government policy recognizing sexual harassment as a violation of women's human rights. They established a broad coalition with workers' organizations and began initial research to determine the nature and extent of the problem of sexual harassment.

Refinement of the WLDI approach
One of the issues we were particularly eager to verify was the soundness of our Human Rights Advocacy training concept. We had learned much from the experience of implementing it in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but we still wanted to verify that the basic approach was germane and applicable in a different context. The primary question we asked was: can participants from different regions learn to effectively implement human rights advocacy strategies through the program we had designed? We particularly focused on the two key elements of project design: content and methodology.
Content
The challenge of the project had been to identify the central and most indispensable concepts an advocate would need to:

• identify a human rights issue,
• propose a policy solution using the human rights framework (instruments and mechanisms),
• design a strategy capable of achieving the proposed solution and
• apply the skills needed to implement the strategy.

Over the course of the Africa project, we refined our core content to several critical ideas. First, we gave special emphasis to the definitions of key concepts, such as "rights," "women's rights," "human rights," "human rights system," "advocacy," etc.. Second, we placed emphasis on the dynamics of human rights development.  We saw that in analyzing contemporary examples how “new” rights have been named and clarified and how governments have been held to account for their actions, key concepts of human rights become more functional to the advocate. We witnessed how motivating it was when advocates realized that they can be successful in enhancing rights. Demonstrating how violence against women came to be recognized as a human rights violation or how rape in conflict situations came to be understood as a crime against humanity are dynamic examples of using contemporary experiences to clarify the role of the advocate in human rights and inspire their activism. Third, we emphasize the link between advocacy as a process and the dynamics of human rights. This implies understanding the local-global relationship, that is, the conditions under which advocacy can be defined as “human rights advocacy,” whether at the local or international level.

Methodology
In addition to the identification of key concepts, the project methodology was refined to emphasize the experiential aspect of learning. Reinforcement of content, practice with new skills, etc. were all done in relationship to the team strategy. Our experience reconfirmed the value of this approach for achieving the kind of learning we had targeted in our human rights advocacy training.

Funding for the African project offered by the MacArthur Foundation, the Banyan Tree Foundation, and the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation.
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