This January, veteran Winrock volunteer, Anaïs Troadec, traveled to Guinea to provide technical assistance to the USAID funded Farmer-to-Farmer for Agriculture Education and Training program. She worked with the Guinean Agriculture Institutions Network (GAIN), which is made up of the five major agriculture education and training institutions in Guinea, to support leadership strategies to improve gender equity at the institutional level. Anaïs is an expert in gender equity and inclusion, and the assignment was implemented successfully through use of Winrock’s Chrysalis Leadership Training for Pioneering Women action plan, coupled with her own materials and experience working with beneficiaries in the region and all over the developing world to provide such training. We are so grateful to Anaïs for donating her time and knowledge to this important project. Once again, she’s gone the extra mile and provided a training that our field staff have called one of the best they’ve seen. As her assignment wrapped up she shared her thoughts with our volunteer programs team:
“What a glorious training we had! In all my 40+ years in development, I have never been so happy with an outcome. The group, twelve women and nine men gelled after several days of hard leadership and gender interaction.
Anais Troadec in Guinea
Bouncing between Chrysalis and my material, through a thoroughly interactive and experiential window, the participants took over the training. We all worked hard to get to an end product that would express the idea of leadership that can engender a change in the contribution of women in Guinean society.
At the closing ceremony the participants acted out nine different themes re: leadership, change and gender in front of VIPs. They were birds in V formation, showing rotating leadership; they acted out the SWOT; they built a working team using four different personalities right on stage. They held hands, men and women, showing ‘interdependence.’
It was wonderful to see how well they interpreted the themes. I know they will do extremely well in ‘giving’ it away to others in their schools. This ‘training of trainers’ worked. And of course, we could not have done it without the enormous contribution of Winrock Guinea’s Country Director, Ibro!
At the end of the performances, the self-confidence, and self-realization that existed was tangible…and it was felt all throughout the space. The invited guests, (very important people) and about 25 students of ENATEF were blown away –and understood very well what the participants wanted them to learn.
Just wanted to share my happiness– and feeling of accomplishment and gratefulness for the opportunity to contribute.”
–Anaïs