Soroptimist from Papua New Guinea gets inspired and empowered!

Florence Bunari is a National from Papua New Guinea and a member of Si Port Morseby. She recently returned from a four week leadership training course run by CEDPA, (Centre for Environment and Development Population Activities www.cedpa.org). This is her report for CEDPA’s leadership training she attended from October 04, 2010 to October 29th 2010 in Jakarta Indonesia.

"I have returned further empowered having participated in every program from day one till the end. This training was facilitated by CEDPA and conducted by highly skilled professional trainers from Washington DC. This training comes under CEDPA’s programme of 'Global Women in Management' and was made possible through a grant from the Exxion Mobil Foundation called 'Women’s Economic Development Initiative'.

There were participants from 6 different Countries around the world, with the biggest contingent from Indonesia (9) and PNG (6) – other participants were from Thailand, Philippines, Egypt, and China. Participants had diverse background; in health, education, entrepreneurs, skills development trainers, project managers, Company Directors, hence the opportunities to learn from each other were also one of the key learning experiences available.

I also had the opportunity to meet an extra ordinary Indonesian woman called Tri Mumpuni, who was the keynote speaker at the opening of the training, an agricultural engineer who had been campaigning to replace diesel power generators with renewable energy at the Indonesian Decision making level since 1996. Puni as she is commonly known with her organization 'People Centered Business and Economic growth' has implemented 60 micro hydro projects throughout villages in Indonesia. Her empowering advise and encouragement to me was:

“Poverty is a universal issues, and to tackle that problem, we need to be consistant in doing programme that will give direct impact, even long term, and we must believe strongly that if we are committed, persistent and have endurance to change something (in a good way) things can be changed. We must do things in the right way instead of doing things right away”.

I was truly empowered by these words.

Over the four weeks training we covered many things, including Women’s leadership, Entrepreneurship, Women’s Economic Participation, Programme up-scaling, Negotiation Skills and Techniques, Project management, Financial management, advocacy, and my favorite was APA – Appreciative Planning and Action.

There were also side trainings held for interested participants. One such training conducted was on ‘Gender’.

I was selected to speak on behalf of the 20 participants at the Reception held in our honor. I took the opportunity to speak briefly about experiences women in PNG face today. My biggest learning and challenge to speak came from within, of the six participants from PNG, I was the only one from Port Moresby and the other five were from some of the most challenging and unforgiving geographic areas of PNG, their stories of life faced by their women in these areas touched my very core, and I was humbled with deep respect for them, and my appreciation of my own country women’s struggles and joys were further deepened. I also took the opportunity to promote SI but mainly the SISWP birthing project we are embarking on.

As CEDPA alumni I have set myself three goals for the next 6 months:

1. To create a database of every NGO working in PNG and what they are doing to work towards the MDGs.
2. To participate in the National Plan of Action for awareness of Trafficking in Persons.
3. To begin much work on the SISWP 'Birthing in the Pacific' Project
   

Our team of 6 PNG participants shared a very unique experience during these four weeks, and have now new networks to help each other towards raising the standard of our lives in PNG."