Written by Mariama Ibrahim,project manager leadership challenge

The project, Strengthening Women’s and Girls’ Leadership for an Inclusive Society (RLFFSI) “Jagorancin Mata da Yan Mata, Bunkassar Al’Umma”, aims to consolidate the achievements of the previous project so that it can be replicated and scale up the Girls’ Leadership Nursery (GLN) initiative. A training course has been initiated to strengthen the capacities of 25 local people on “associative life, texts and laws in Niger, techniques for conducting a good campaign and good governance”.

It was also an opportunity to explain to the local skills (trainers) the importance of mentoring so that they in turn train and supervise the out-of-school and out-of-school young girl leaders identified in the 25 communities of the ZIP (Project Intervention Zone) and also to group them so that they can learn in a structured and mutual way and be financially autonomous in order to overcome some of the difficulties of daily life.

We had the honour of seeing a 44-year-old female counsellor named Dijé Marri who testified to the importance of the training in her words: “The NGO Leadership Challenges and its partners are real workers thanks to the different training/capacity strengthening that they had provided us. I am one of the councillors of the commune of Djirataoua and I urge you, the trainers of the girl leaders, to have a lot of patience and to follow the training well. Before, we didn’t know much about ourselves. But with the intervention of Leadership Challenges and its partners, I can express my point of view even before the President of the Republic. Know that young girls and boys will be the great ones of tomorrow, involve them. Currently, I have organised young people into a group called “Yara Manyan Gobé” with a view to their economic empowerment.