Building the Capacity of Advocates

Capacity building was integral to all of WLDI's work in keeping with its role of serving the needs and interests of women's rights workers around the world. Our research and advocacy initiatives on human rights, legal literacy and strategies to combat violence against women were all geared to developing the capacity of women to be effective in the defense and promotion of women's rights. Training programs aimed to develop a corps of women's rights activists/defenders/activists with the ability to effectively use or challenge the law -- national and international -- to  assure that women's rights would be real and effective in their lives. Our capacity building programs also aimed to enlarge the power and influence of the global movement for women’s human rights.
​Three WLD capacity building programs evolved over the years.​​

1. Advanced Human Rights Training for Women. This program focused on learning the substance and practice of women’s human rights advocacy, over a two year period. It had three applications. In one, WLDI collaborated with the Open Society Institute's Network Women’s Program to train women in Central and Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States. Over 122 women from 22 countries participated. The second took place in East and Central Africa, with 32 participants from 6 African countries. The third program took place in the Eastern region of Nigeria with xx participants representing seven Nigerian states. Workshops were also held in Indonesia.
2. ​ The Activist Facilitator's Project. Responding to  increasing calls for assistance, WLDI initiated a second type of training program. It was a systematic and intensive training over two years to develop facilitators of women’s human rights advocacy. Nineteen women from 15 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean participated.
3. ​ Russian Lawyer's Domestic Violence Project. Still another program worked with Russian lawyers specifically on violence against women issues in crisis centers across Russia.

Each of these capacity building projects drew from and contributed to the human rights training course and materials described in the last section. They all had similar goals and content, but contextual variables. Each will be explored in the next pages.​

ADVANCED HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCACY TRAINING

• Central and Eastern Europe and Newly Independent States 
• East and Central Africa
• Nigeria 

ACTIVIST FACILITATOR'S TRAINING
RUSSIAN LAWYERS TRAINING

Anastasia Posadskaya at workshop in Ukraine

Oby Nwanko, Nigeria program

Workshop on economic rights in Mongolia

Central and East Africa human rights workshop

Marg Schuler teaching UN human rights instruments and mechanisms!

Continue on to Human Rights Training in::

Advanced HR Training