Village Cascade Training towards empowering Chepang Women

Development Exchange Center organized a two days cascade training each in six Village Development Committees (VDCs) in joint partnership with National Chepang Association as Local Partner and South Asia Partnership as Capacity Building Partner in funding assistance of UNDEF. These events were organized in Siddhi, Shaktikhor, Kaule, Korak, Lothar, Chandibhanjyang from August 16 to September 8, 2015. Altogether 188 participants participated in this training, most of these participants were the executive members (President, Secretary, Treasurer, Vice President, Joint Secretary, and member) from 30 Women Chepang Action Fora (WoCAF); among these participants 10 were Chepang males who were there to support Chepang empowerment process through their inputs to these groups.   The event was organized

The major objective of the cascade training was to enhance leadership capacity and networking skills of Chepang women.  However, major specific objectives were:

1. To increase facilitation skills of Local Resource Persons (LRPs) enabling them to inspire other Chepang women to raise their concerns.

2. To increase knowledge of Chepang women on local governance planning process, Social Accountability and Social Mobilization

The major content covered in the training were gender, equity and equality, social mobilization concept, qualities of social mobilizer, facilitation skills, concept of reflect model, steps of budget planning process, intervention of Chepang Women in Budget planning process at VDC level, role of WoCAF, concept of Social Accountability and its tools like Community Score Card (CSC), Public Hearing, Social Audit with highlight on CSC etc. Games, storytelling, role play, group work, presentation etc were the methods and tools used in conducting this training.

The above training supported in developing a pool of co-facilitators amongst the trainees who support the LRPs in facilitating Women Chepang Action Fora (WoCAF) for raising Chepang women’s issues in more solidified manner. These training programs were conducted in initiation of Female Local Resource Persons of the project. Project coordinator facilitated these program and Monitoring and Evaluation officer supported all these training events and collected necessary information and data from the training. It was realized that there should be additional capacity enhancement for these Local Resource Persons so additional refresher training will be organized by DEC Nepal Project Team Members.

The contents of the training were very suitable for development of Chepang community.  There was full and active participation of participants. By the end of the training session the participants appreciated the training content and remarked “the training was very effective and important for their overall leadership and empowerment process.”

On the fifth event in Shaktikhor Mr. Padam BK monitoring representative from UNDP and Mr. Narendra Prasad Joshi, Project Director was present to observe the training event. At the end of the program remarks and suggestions provided by these representatives were very motivating.