Girls Wanna Run! Training Nepal's Generation Next!

After eight months, our 20 Young Women's Political Leadership Institute (YWPLI) Fellows graduated from the YWPLI, a program designed to empower young women with an interest in politics to become the next generation of women leaders in Nepal.

During the intensive program, our Fellows received hands-on, in-depth training on various topics, such as Gender and the Constitution, Envisioning a Modern Nepal, and Privilege and Bias.  They also had the opportunity to volunteer and campaign with a candidate of their choice during the Federal and Provincial Elections.

Our Fellows also were given the opportunity to identify and address political issues within their own communities by implementing advocacy projects on a range of topics, such as youth apathy towards politics, political literacy, women in politics, and community engagement. Through these projects, the Fellows were able to successfully engage local community members with key political issues, and inspire more young people to be involved in politics.

The YWPLI Graduation Ceremony provided our 20 Fellows with the chance to share and reflect on their experiences in the programs with an 82-person audience, consisting of friends, peers, parents and local women political leaders.

The program had a strong, positive impact on the participants, strengthening their passion for politics and willingness to challenge the status quo.

"The realization and the learnings that came with being a part of the YWPLI are something that I will cherish throughout my life. Over time, I also realize that I now have the responsibility to make other people aware so that they can influence the politics of the country as well" - 2018 YWPLI Fellow Sagoon.

“I am a person who learns through discussions and every session was a learning experience for me that broadened my perspectives on values, ethics, identity, and goals. I feel grateful to have gotten such a wonderful and interactive platform so early in my life and for this I would like to thank Women LEAD for unleashing the role players and decision makers in us; helping us realize the importance of women reaching out for women; pushing each other to greater heights,” says 2018 YWPLI Fellow Anukriti.

A photo exhibition during the Ceremony showcased the achievements of the Fellows throughout the eight-month program.

In the coming months, two of our graduates will be heading to New York to attend the UN Commission on the Status of Women. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for these young women to broaden their knowledge of politics from the local to the global level, and learn how to leverage international legal frameworks and decision-making bodies to advance women’s political rights and empowerment in Nepal.

Stay tuned for updates on our incredible YWPLI Fellows’ journey to New York!

Links:

• YWPLI Graduation Video
• Sign up to Women LEAD's monthly newsletter!

The second part of the 2018 Young Women’s Political Leadership Institute focused on political activism. Through bi-monthly workshops and advocacy projects, YWPLI Fellows learned about Nepal’s power structures and how these can be used to influence change.They also discussed the barriers to a well-functioning democracy and designed projects to address the main hurdles that they identified. Simran and her friends chose to focus on women’s political participation and their art installation, called the Political Women of Nepal was visited by more than 60 young people.

Through our advocacy project, we showcased the journey of successful female leaders to inspire other young women to join politics. In total, our group interviewed ten women and collected photographs to represent their personal and political lives. We then created an art installation to show their life story and the turning points that led them to pursue a career in politics. The idea was to give young women visiting the exhibition someone they could relate to and be inspired by. We hope that our message was clear: politics is not an inaccessible world!

All of the women I interviewed were amazing. They each had a unique and invaluable perspective on politics and I’ve learned so much from the lessons and experiences they have acquired through their lifetime. It was hard to choose just one, but I decided to highlight in this report Binda Pandey, a labor activist and member of the Constituent Assembly because of the impact her work had for women in Nepal.

Binda Pandey was one of the few female politicians involved in the writing of Nepal’s new Constitution. She confessed that adopting laws to promote gender equality wasn’t an easy process. It took a lot of effort, perseverance, and the use of clever tactics to pass progressive laws, like the one that set gender quotas in political representation. Her perseverance paid off though and now Nepal has the most progressive Constitution in South Asia in terms of gender equality! I was lucky to receive her recipe for a successful career in politics: a strong ideology, a sound knowledge of the topic you are advocating for, strong communication and debating skills, the ability to build networks, and most importantly resilience!

I didn’t realize at the beginning of the project how much I would gain from talking with these successful politicians. They shared their life lessons with us and I got a glimpse of the types of challenges that I may face in the future. My biggest takeaway from this project was to seize every opportunity that comes my way and get out of my comfort zone, starting with giving a speech at the YWPLI graduation ceremony!