The Mawazo Institute has inaugurated its first CoreCourse on Personal Leadership, which was delivered online by our partners Open Circles and the venerable Hope Chigudu, an activist with decades of experience in feminist movement building and feminist leadership development.
For the Personal Leadership Course, which was conducted over a period of 4 days via webinar, all Fellows joined the proceedings, and were rewarded with a robust curriculum that touched on various topics, including Hope’s powerful session on shedding labels of womanhood and finding one’s true self, being grounded, and boldly healing the inner person for a more resilient outer life. For their part, Open Circles focused on courage-building, vulnerability, empathy and shame resilience as key to building the leadership “muscle” for more inclusive cultures. The Fellows later gave feedback that these sessions had been the perfect start to the 2023 Mawazo Fellowship, allowing them to bond as a group, albeit online, and joining in from sixteen (16) different countries.
Following the close of the Personal Leadership CoreCourse, Fellows immediately embarked on the second CoreCourse on Budgeting and Financial Management, a course that gives simple, but often overlooked, practice in the use of Excel spreadsheets for financial management. This course is offered strategically at this point in the fellowship period as it arms the Fellows with tools, they need to handle the stipendiary and project funding they are likely to receive as Mawazo Fellows. More importantly, it offers longer-term skills that Fellows can use post-fellowship to apply for further funding from other bodies.
We have had past Fellows use these skills to land prestigious awards from organisations such as the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards and Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) fellowships. The Budgeting and Financial Management course takes a total of ten (10) weeks, where Fellows have access to course material, pre-recorded video classes, live webinars, and Teaching Assistants who help them with grading and understanding concepts through the different course modules. We are excited to see that this course is also registering 100% attendance, showing the enthusiasm and drive of our 2023 Mawazo Fellows.
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