‘Women 4 Leadership’ Women's Leadership Academy: The launch of the 2019 Training Session

Sixty-five women leaders from various regions of the Republic of Moldova gathered in Chisinau to participate in the roundtable that started the 2019 training session of the ‘Women 4 Leadership’ Women’s Leadership Academy, being encouraged by project organisers and partners, as well as be the participants from the previous edition, to take full advantage of this opportunity to make their voice heard and their initiatives turned into reality.

Date: Monday, 4 March 2019

Anna Lyberg, Ambassador of Sweden in the Republic of Moldova. Credit: UN Women Moldova/ Ramin Mazur

The ‘Women 4 Leadership’ project is implemented by the Association ‘Institutum Virtutes Civilis’ (IVC) and IP CRAION CONTACT-Cahul in partnership with UN Women Moldova (United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) and is financed by Sweden. It was set up, after the sessions held in 2018, in a platform for dialogue, training and action for the women leaders of Moldova.

‘It is the right approach at the right time’, said H.E. Mrs. Anna Lyberg, Ambassador of Sweden to the Republic of Moldova, having mentioned that women that come together at the Women’s Leadership Academy can ‘also inspire other women towards other positive initiatives’.

The roundtable launching the 2019 training session took place on 1 March 2019 and comprised several welcome messages from the project organisers and partners, as well as a presentation of the Women's Leadership Academy goals and inspirational messages from the participants to the 2018 project sessions.

In her greeting message to the participants, UN Women Moldova Program Officer Elena Ratoi emphasised that every time ‘when decisions are made and policies are developed, women have to participate’, and that UN Women supports the involvement and participation of women in decision-making.

The chairperson of ‘Institutum Virtutes Civilis’ Association, Liliana Palihovici, expressed her hope for all the participants in this training session to become mayors and elected local and rayon councillors, ‘with a determination to become transformational leaders’.

The agenda of the ‘Women 4 Leadership’ project event also includes, for 1-3 March 2019, a training on empowering women to participate in decision-making processes, supported by national and international experts.

The project „Women 4 Leadership” was built into a dialogue platform, education and action for leader women in Moldova. Credit: UN Women Moldova/ Ramin Mazur

The Executive Director of IP CRAION CONTACT-Cahul, Silvia Strelciuc, said that the Women's Leadership Academy represents a unique opportunity for women of Moldova to a ‘transfer of best practices with excellent experts’.

One of the participants in the previous sessions of the ‘Women 4 Leadership’ project, Diana Grosu, encouraged the women gathered under the Women's Leadership Academy ‘to have courage and to get involved’, saying that when she ran in the parliamentary election of February 2019, the experience from those trainings did help her a lot.

At the „Women 4 Leadership” Academy, have participated 65 women leaders from different regions of Moldova. Credit: UN Women Moldova/ Ramin Mazur

The common hope of ‘Women 4 Leadership’ project organisers, partners and participants, expressed in the first training session of 2019, is for this Women's Leadership Academy generation to repeat and even surpass the results achieved by the women leaders of last year’s generation and that these achievements will bring benefits both to participants and the communities they come from by means of genuine and equal participation of women in decision-making processes.