THINK-able: shifting the mind-set of women with disabilities in Abuja focuses to help Women Living With Disability (WWD) gain leadership competencies, engage in a mentorship relationship that expands their networks and helps them observe successful women closely to shift their mindset from a victim mentality to a position of power and self confidence. THINK-able helps build leadership essential competencies of WWD to explore their social identities, create personal vision, clarify mental models, hone goal setting skills, improve communication. Implementation uses a mentorship approach, were WWD are paired with local successful women in the community for a period of nine months, to help them enhance their skills, career paths and networks. Women with disabilities have many limitations, but none as crippling as a mindset-characterised by low self esteem, lack of leadership competences and inability to speak out and be heard. Leadership Essential competencies helps WWD explore their social identities, create personal vision, clarify mental models, hone goal setting skills, improve communication. Using experiential and transformative activities, classroom sessions are augmented by appropriate outdoor activities, games, role plays and mimes. WWD are paired with local successful women in the community for a period of nine months, to help them enhance their skills, career paths and networks. Community service activity is to help WWD move from a position of self pity and self stigmatisation to one of empowerment by offering them opportunities to serve their communities.

Disability is not inability: Empowering women with disabilities to pursue their dreams  

The facilitator could not ‘see’. The co-facilitator could not ‘hear’. Two special women with disabilities, faced with a task they had never handled before. But they were prepared. After an intensive one-week Training-of-Trainers (TOT) course, they were ready to step down the content of the transformational leadership development content to their peers. As the group of participants in the leadership workshop stared expectantly at their ‘pilot and co-pilot’, you could tell that they were rooting for them. They wanted them to succeed. Because their success would prove one more point, that women with disabilities were just as smart, brave, intelligent and fun as anyone else. 

Women living with disabilities (WWDs) have many limitations, but none as crippling as a mind-set characterised by low self-esteem, lack of leadership competencies and inability to speak out and be heard. Many excellent projects that are developed by or for WWD are focused on policies, advocacies or economic empowerment. Many hard-working WWDs would excel if they had some life skills necessary for social integration into their communities.  Steps to the Top Leadership Center (STLC) sought to fill that gap by offering services in terms of personal leadership development, mentorship and positive shifts in mind-set. 

STLC is primarily an organization whose mandate is leadership development for youth, women and vulnerable populations. STLC offers tailor fitted and audience specific content based on individual and group needs assessment. Its goal is to ensure that anyone in its sphere of influence becomes a better leader, communicates better, and has improved self-esteem and confidence. It has previously worked with out of school youth, blind youth, youth in hard-to-reach locations and women with disabilities. With the tag line ‘Imagine the Possibilities’, STLC believes that every individual should have the environment to dream and have those dreams fulfilled.  

STLC developed a baseline project, Project THINK-able, with 3 thematic areas of Leadership Development, Mentorship and Community service and from 2017-2018, Project Thinkable engaged WWDs in transformational leadership development and engaging conversations. THINK-able Two scaled up and consolidated the excellent outcomes of the first year. Women with Disabilities are moved from participating and learning to Leading and Learning. They are supported to train other WWDs with leadership skills. They mentor and support peers to design and carry out community service.  

‘Kaka, an 18-year-old blind girl was devastated. She just learned at the last minute that she was being dropped from a much-anticipated holiday camp because the organisers did not have the skills, content or resources to serve her special needs in an activity based outdoor-themed camp. Her distraught mother lamented that while her child was doing well academically, she was rather timid, had little self-esteem and could not communicate properly outside the immediate family. She wondered if her daughter would ever get into programming that would build her up for a competitive world. It turned out that lack of self-confidence and low self-esteem was a rather wide spread challenge in the female disability community. Because of this, they were more vulnerable to physical, verbal and sexual abuse. 

Kaka’s story was a call to action. Simon, the program officer at STLC suggested the annual leadership camp should be opened up to women and girls with disabilities.‘Our leadership development programs are life changing. Why don’t we adapt it to women and girls with disabilities? We can ask volunteers to mentor them. What do you think?’ Simon asked. ‘It’s an exciting possibility’, the managers responded, ‘but it will take a lot of planning and adaptation, especially for the outdoor activities….and they will also have to do community service. The idea must be to shift their mind set, build self-confidence and change the community perception of WWD’. The program should help to project WWD as active, contributing members of the community rather that burdens or persons to be pitied or tolerated. In the end, STLC designed a year-long leadership development program that incorporated didactic sessions with outdoor experiential activities. It recruited successful community women and assigned them to the WWD as mentors, and the mentors worked with their mentees to design and carry out suitable community service activities. 

In the second year, alumni of the program served not just as mentors, but actually facilitated the contents to the next cohort. A training-of-Trainers component ensured that whatever the disability, the women were trained and given the tools and support to step up and share what they’d learned with others. As outcomes, the women became better communicators, expanded their networks and contact and shifted their mind-set in terms of their ability to serve others by looking beyond their disabilities. 

The project learned some critical lessons in the course of implementation. For example, planning a program for women with special needs should be tailored to the individual woman. One size does not fit all. The women were more comfortable with their aides (For example family members) rather than the aides offered by the program. Also a lot of emotional intelligence is required to communicate seamlessly with WWD. The perception of WWD as burdens to the society is real and all stakeholders need to collaborate to shift the paradigm.     

The biggest win for the project is the number of women who have gone on to start their business or non-profit and who openly credit project Thinkable as the Catalyst that changed their lives. Aver took the fight to the kitchen with AVERCAKES after one year as a participant and the second year as a mentor. Favour started a contributory cooperative service, inspired by STLC’s mantra ‘Imagine the Possibilities’. 

Project thinkable sought to ‘Shift the mind-set of women with disabilities’ using a three-pronged strategy of Leadership Development programming, Mentorship and Community service. The rewards were far beyond its expectations. The limitations that the project assumed during planning were inconsequential. None of the experiential activities were cancelled because the women were more than able to perform tasks with creativity and resilience. So, in the end, it was the mind-set of the implementation team that shifted as they witnessed the creativity, doggedness and tenacity these women must show daily to survive in a volatile and unfriendly environment. All they need is support. 

This project is an apt demonstration that policies, legislation and material help, while important, does not entirely solve the issues of populations that have been marginalized because of disabilities or other issues that make them feel less important. A psychological shift resulting in self-belief and self-confidence is as equally important.