Women Deliver Emerging Leaders for Change East Africa Cohort 2024
The Women Deliver Emerging Leaders for Change Program is a two-year leadership program that supports passionate young activists with the resources, platforms, connections, and trainings necessary to amplify and achieve their advocacy goals. Women Deliver, with its strong commitment to both gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), has a strong history of equitable youth engagement and co-leadership.
The Emerging Leaders Program is a focused, well-resourced, thematically-bound program that will co-create each Emerging Leader’s advocacy journey with them. It is the result of us:
- Taking stock of a decade’s worth of lessons learned
- Reflecting on our own transformation as an organization
- Conducting numerous consultations with youth and partners in the field
Women Deliver will work with each Emerging Leader on developing their journey with flexible funding, support, trainings, and resources.
Benefits
Each Emerging Leader’s journey in the Emerging Leaders Program will be customized based on their advocacy goals, as well as their own goals for personal skills-building and growth as advocates. Opportunities available to Emerging Leaders on this journey include:
- Training, Mentorship, and Peer Learning: With the aim of equipping Emerging Leaders with essential advocacy skills and knowledge critical to excel at their role as advocates, the Emerging Leaders Program facilitates dynamic collaborative learning experiences. Based on customized, self-created learning journeys, Emerging Leaders will give and receive training, co-create and receive resources, benefit from relevant mentorship from Young Leader Alumni based in their region or country, and have access to peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing opportunities.
- Flexible Funding: Emerging Leaders will be provided with 18-month, flexible, trust-based grants ranging from $5,000 – $50,000USD to support their advocacy and to strengthen their organizations, along with technical assistance and context-specific resources.
- Convenings: Women Deliver is well known for its convening power, and this will extend to the Emerging Leaders Program. Each Emerging Leader will attend one fully-funded Opening Workshop and one fully-funded Closing Workshop, each designed to build relationships among Emerging Leaders and advance learning based on their customized learning goals. The workshops will be co-created and co-led by Emerging Leaders.
- A Supportive Ecosystem of Partners: The Emerging Leaders program increases Emerging Leaders’ access to and collaboration with national, regional, or global advocacy coalitions or networks and to provide feminist collective care, support, and solidarity.
- Political Engagement and Influencing in Regional and Global Advocacy Spaces: Political engagement and influencing opportunities allow Emerging Leaders to engage directly with decision-makers.
You should check out: TWAS-DFG Cooperation Visits Programme 2024 for Sub-Saharan Africa [ Funded ]
Eligibility for Women Deliver Emerging Leaders
- Application should be in East Africa, specifically the following countries: Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.
- You do not need to be a citizen of these or originally from these countries — you just need to live and conduct your advoacy in these countries.
- Special Exception: If you do not live in one of these countries (but your advocacy work is still targeting one of these countries) because it is unsafe for your to reside there while conducting your advocacy work, you are eligible for this program. If this is the case, you will be given the opportunity to elaborate on your situation in the application.
- Example: You are an advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights in one of the eligible countries, but live in South Africa since it had become unsafe for you to live in the eligible country while doing this work.
- Those applying for this program must be between ages 15-29 as of 1 October 2024. If under age 18, you will need permission and consent from your parent/guardian to join this program.
- This program is open to all gender and sexual identities with a emphasis on those who identify as girls, women, or non-binary.
- Must be an advocate for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and/or gender equality, particularly focusing on advocacy that affects adolescent girls within their communities. Preference will be given for those interested or experienced in our focus issue areas: universal health coverage, the climate crisis, and countering the anti-rights movement.
- This program requires competency in the English language.
