A Women’s Leadership Initiative Project

This project was implemented by PDO with the support of Heartland International and funded by the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The project ran from 2018 to 202, with the aim of enhancing women’s leadership potential, targeting women and girls for this purpose. However, working in some areas on the youth and men. The project’s activities covered the dispersed borders of the five governorates: Baghdad, Basra, Al-Muthanna, Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk and focused mainly on displaced women and girls, displaced women and survivors from the clutches of ISIS. Within the framework of the same project, both the Shayan and Rowshen Centers worked and provided psych-social and legal services to girls and women. In 2021, the two centers worked only on 1,869 people, while continuing to work in holding 78 seminars and awareness-raising activities for 1,497 participants. The economic aspect of girls and women was one of the features that the project gave full importance to, hence the shocking financial support for four small projects founded by girls and women, including the soap-making project in Halabja, education and support for two girls in the field of photography in Halabja as well, and the openingof a shop to sell children’s play tools in Khanke camp Duhok in addition to a beauty salon for a young woman in Duhok as well. The project gave importance to the media, so in 2021 it prepared a weekly radio program to educate girls and women from a legal point of view, which was broadcast from five different stations. Social media received 700,000 views across the Kurdistan Region.Several meetings were held on defending women’s rights in order to achieve the project’s objectives; Ten successful meetings on inheritance rights for Yazidi women, with the participation of 57 women and 63 men of religious and social figures and those with influence in their areas, in addition to meetings with political parties to pressure them to work on a policy against sexual harassment and demand them to give the issue importance in their strategies, policies and actions. Within the framework of the project, the People for Development Organization (PDO) became one of the participants in the continuous meetings of the 1325 Erbil Network on the mechanisms for implementing resolution 1325 of the United Nations Security Council, in addition to the special meetings organized by the PDO to deliberate on the preparation of the draft law of combating domestic violence. As a result the first reading was done by the parliament.