Landesa: Women’s Land Rights Visiting Professionals Program

Jan 16, 2014 | Landesa: Center for Women's Land Rights

The Women’s Land Rights Visiting Professional Program is cultivating a network of qualified professionals who are strongly committed to strengthening women’s land rights. The program will boost visiting professionals’ capacity to effectively strengthen women’s land rights, foster motivation and ability to actively participate in this network, and reinforce the commitment to working on women’s land rights.

Landesa’s experience working with multicultural programs suggests that a hands-on, intensive program working alongside peers from different countries and with different fields of expertise will be beneficial to all parties. It will create a fertile ground for learning and will promote the level of group cohesion required to sustain the long-lasting network of professionals we aim to develop.

The Women’s Land Rights Visiting Professionals Program is an intensive six-week session for practitioners, activists, and government professionals conducted at Landesa’s office in Seattle. This experience is intended to boost their capabilities by:

• Enhancing their understanding of the challenges to strengthening women’s land rights by identifying what the problems are and how they fit into the larger picture, both in relation to other development issues and what is taking place in other geographic or political regions;
• Expanding the set of options, approaches, and potential solutions they can consider by learning from what has been tried in other settings, by learning from solutions to different-but-related problems, by becoming part of a network of colleagues who can act as a resource, and by being encouraged to think creatively; and
• Improving their effectiveness at addressing the challenges of securing women’s land rights by strengthening their leadership, managerial, and written and verbal communication skills.

Landesa will continue the knowledge transfer and mentor engagement with each visiting professional on a project for up to one year after they return to their home countries.

The application process for the 2014 Visiting Professionals Program is now open until February 14. Please use this link to apply.