Capacity Building of Women workers to take up seniors leadership positions through the Women Leadership Development Program

Article | 05 January 2022
The Women Leadership development program has provided a career development opportunity for potential female workers by providing Soft skills/leadership skills and technical skills classroom training for 5 days and on job coaching and mentorship program for three months. The program supported selected women leaders to have the right skills to undertake more senior roles in their factory. In addition to that, assigned factory mentors have received capacity building training on Supervisory/leadership skills and workplace coaching and mentoring training.
To date, this intervention benefited 74 women workers in 10 Better Work Registered Factories found in Bole Lemi and Hawassa Industrial Park through the 5 days soft and technical skills training and three months of mentoring and coaching.
On October 29, Siraye organized an experience sharing workshop with factory managers and representatives, buyers, donors and program participants( both mentors and mentees).The major objective of this workshop was to capture the achievements, lesson learnt and challenges of the intervention in factories in Bole Lemi Industrial Park. In the workshop, factory representatives presented their experiences, lessons learned and program outcomes/ successes on their respective factories.
In addition to improvement in productivity and quality in the piloted lines of the participant factories, the following are the key program outcomes/successes,
  • Improved participants (women leaders) communication skills and confidence in managing operators
  • Improved participants relationships with workers under their supervision
  • Enhanced workplace cooperation and workplace organization
  • Participants developed a culture of providing constructive feedback for operators under their supervision
  • Enhanced participants problem-solving skill and conflict resolution skills
  • Participants Improved skills in visual management of KPI’s
Furthermore, 56.5% of the trained mentees who went through the 3 months mentorship/coaching are in the pipeline to be promoted to the next leadership position.
Siraye/ One ILO is organizing another experience sharing workshop for factories in Hawassa Industrial park.
By drawing lessons from the pilot phase of this intervention, Siraye has officially launched the second round of this program in Better Work Registered factory by providing 5 days soft/leadership and technical skills training to four factories found in Bole Lemi Industrial Park. Our program has organized an experience sharing Workshop on December 23 to share the experiences of factories in Hawassa which participated in the pilot intervention.