FATE Foundation Programme for Aspiring Women Entrepreneurs

FYI for budding business women.

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Fate Foundation in partnership with Citi Foundation presents to you the 2nd batch of the women's programme titled The Leading Female Entrepreneur coming up on the 9th and 10th of August 2010. This program is targeted at aspiring and budding Nigerian women between the ages of 18 -45 that are posed for leadership and entrepreneurship achievement.

The programme will take place in Fate Foundations Lagos office and would run for 2
days. The programme would involve successful and prominent Nigerian entrepreneurs
facilitating, budding and equipping entrepreneurs with the skills, tools, techniques
and necessary networking methods required to maintain successful businesses in the
Nigerian business environment.

Registration for the programme is on and ends on the 4th of August 2010. Registration
fee cost N5000 only. Breakfast, lunch, materials for the program and certificates will be provided.

Interested participants are to download and fill the application form, pay the
registration fee into our Guaranty Trust Bank Account number 201/110752/3/110. The
filled application form attached with a copy of bank teller MUST be sent in hard copy
to our office 1st floor, Lagos State Water Corporation Building, Ijora Lagos or in soft
copy to mojieleso@fatefoundation.com. Please note that any application recieved after the 4th of August will not be considered.

For further inquiries please call Moji on 01-8797074 or send me a mail via
mojieleso@fatefoundation.com. Please endeavor to register promptly as we have limited seats for the programme.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Moji
Coordinator, Short Entrepreneurial Courses
Fate Foundation
+234.1.879.7074

V Monologues 2009

To celebrate the International Women's Day, Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND) - www.kind.org - presents V Monologues: The Nigerian Story, a play based on interviews from 150 women from all over the country. The aim of the play is to raise awareness on violence against women and girls in our society. The gate fee will be donated to charity.

When & Where:
Mar 21 at Goethe-Institut, Ozumba Mbadiwe, Victoria Island (please register!)
Mar 25 & 26 at Muson Centre
Mar 27 at National Arts Theatre, 5PM

Read my post on last year's performance.

Women in Business

There are quite a number of funding and micro finance opportunities targeted at women only. Helping women is in. Apart from being part of measures to address gender imbalances, many companies are keen to tap into the potential economic force that they represent.

New York Times examined this trend last December, profiling Goldman Sach's 10,000 Women initiative. As part of this initiative, Goldman Sachs is sponsoring Nigerian women for a four-month Certificate in Entrepreneurial Management program at the
Pan-African University in Lagos.

Visit the 10,000 Women website to read more about the program. I just realised that the latest round of applications ended on Friday, Jan 9. However, you can visit the Pan-African University website to learn about possible future opportunities.

African Women Bloggers

Looking for information online can be so difficult. It's so easy to get sidetracked with one thing on the other. Reading the Technorati report, I decided to check the page for my blog there and saw that Ore's Notes was listed among Afrigator's top 45 female African bloggers (and just one of 3 blogs by Nigerian women).

Of course, this is drawn from blogs listed on Afrigator (Afrigator is an African social media aggregator), which is dominated by South African blogs (I used it last year to search for blogs by African women).

One good thing from this discovery is finding some new blogs to peruse.

Questionnaire on African Women Bloggers

For African women who blog on issues that are of particular relevance to other women on the continent, please take some time to answer the following questions. I'm working on an article on how African women are using blogs to promote gender equity and empower themselves. Don't be scared! It looks like a lot of questions, but you'll zoom right through them -I promise!

I have an online survey up now, so you can take the survey there, or if you prefer, you can copy and paste the survey below into a Word document and fill-in your answers before emailing to me (oreblogging@yahoo.com).

General Information:

• What is your age?
• What is your country of residence?
• What is your highest level of educational qualification?
• Are you currently studying?
• What is your current employment status?
• What is your occupation?

Background Information on your Blog:

• What is your blog URL?
• When did you begin this/your blog (month and year)?
• How frequently do you update this blog?

Your Purpose of Blogging:

• Did you start this blog with specific topic(s) in mind to write about?
  • If ‘Yes’, what were the topics?


• Indicate on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 1 being ‘Very Important’ and 5 being ‘Very Unimportant’) how important it is to you to empower other women through your blog?


• Do you identify yourself as a feminist?
  
  • If ‘No’, what are your reasons?


• If you hope to empower women through your blog, how do you do this? (e.g. Bring to light issues of in justice against women; Foster a discussion between you and your readers; Mobilise people for specific social action; Share your perspective on women’s issues; Other – Please explain).

Blogs by African Women:

• How do you think blogs can be used to promote women’s equity and empowerment?


• What would you say are the most commonly-discussed topics on the blogs by African women that you have visited?


• Do you feel that there are enough blogs by African women that address issues of gender equity, feminism, social development (especially as it pertains to women) and/or general issues of women’s empowerment?
  
  • If you feel there aren’t enough blogs that deal with these issues, what do you think are the reasons for this?
  
  
  • How do you think more African woman can be encouraged to blog about these issues?


• Please name 5 blogs that address these issues (include the URLs).
  
  • What do you like about these blogs?


• What are the unique features of blogs (or other web 2.0* tools) that make them suitable for raising issues of women’s empowerment?


• Please name some organisations that you know of which use blogs or other web 2.0 tools for collaborative project work.


• Generally speaking, what are some of the factors that you think might prevent many African women from blogging?

Please send your responses to oreblogging@yahoo.com. Feel free to forward to any African women bloggers you know of who are using their blogs to promote women's equality and empowerment. Meanwhile I might try and put this into a proper survey tool.

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* Web 2.0 refers to proposed second generation Internet-based services that promote online collaboration and sharing of information among users e.g. blogs, wikis, social networking sites (e.g. MySpace), tags, video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Google Video), photo-sharing sites (e.g. Flickr). (Check Wikipedia for more info.)

Pambazuka News Celebrates IWD

Sokari Ekine at Pambazuka News celebrates International Women's Day by profiling 6 blogs by African women. I am honoured that Ore's Notes was included among such exceptional blogs.

I am also happy to note that Sokari includes Black Looks. With Sokari at the helm, Black Looks has maintained its position as a blog extraordinaire with her incisive writing on social issues affecting the African continent. While readers might not always agree with what Sokari has to say, they know that they can expect blogs that continually challenge us to think about Africa's socio-economic problems. In the past year, she has continued to innovate by opening up her blog to a team of talented writers.

I hope that in the next year more African women are encouraged to share their thoughts on blogs - either on theirs or through contributions to someone elses.

African Women Blogging

I am interested in how African women are using blogs to promote women's equality and empowerment. As we well know, many women are using blogs as a tool for self-expression, to bring to a wider audience their unique perspective of life as an African women. I'd really love to hear about such blogs, particularly blogs that are pushing for social change and the upliftment of African women's socio-economic status.

I hope that was clear enough. If you know of such blogs or bloggers; or resources to read please post here or email me at: oreblogging@yahoo.com.

Communion

Again, it’s late at night (1.49AM, so technically it’s the wee hours of the morning) and I am still up. What happened to my ardent vow to be asleep by 11PM?

I really wanted to finish reading Communion: The Female Search for Love by bell hooks. I usually don't have time to read during the week and it seems that the time before I sleep is when I get most of my reading done these days, so I took the opportunity.

Communion has been an interesting book. I don’t think I read much about love – at least not much that critically examines women’s quest for love, in a very different way from the fluffy way that many women’s magazines do (though, admittedly, some women’s mags do some good write-ups too). The book has made me think about my ideas of love. It’s funny how when you are young you instinctively know what you want out of life. You know your likes and your dislikes. You may not be able to properly articulate why you feel the way you do, but still many of those feelings run deep.

I have always known that I wanted a partnership in which my significant other and I work together in harmony (I think that’s the best way to sum it up). That ideal never really changed as I grew older. It has only been recently, moving back home, that I have started to wonder if I am unrealistic in my expectations. The general consensus here seems to be that the woman will always do more. Accept it and move on. This acceptance will, at least, spur you on to find ways to cope with it i.e. hire nannies and house-helps, take on a less demanding job or be prepared not to work for a few years, etc.

To me, these are really not good enough because they don’t address the real issue, which is the underlying assumption that women should do more.

bell hooks says that It is a mark of the failure of feminist thinking to change the dominant patriarchal notion that in every relationship there is a dominant and a submissive party. It seemed that for a while, many feminists advocated a turning of the tables, so that women ruled the roosts over men. In many parts of Africa, that would be incredibly hard work and, to me, totally unnecessary. Working together in partnership should be the ideal that we strive for rather than a hierarchy with one person at the top and the other at the bottom.

Mutuality, like love itself, must come through work. Wise women know that the happiest, most fulfilling committed partnerships … are those in which mutuality is the core value, in which the spiritual growth and development of each individual matters.

Mutuality is a great word, by the way.

Feminist Dating in a Patriarchal World

I listened to this hilarious podcast last night about a woman and her quest for 'the one'. I'm sure that we all read about women's dating travails on an almost daily basis, so what made this story so different? Well, the narrator was a feminist and many of the arguments she got into with her dates were so reminiscent of many of the fights I used to have. Growing up, I didn't have a clue what feminism was. In Nigeria, it was still referred to as "women's lib", and no, it wasn't all that long ago. I did know that I wanted an equitable partnership with my significant other, which is not the same as equal. Equal, to me denotes, that we would split all tasks evenly and that we would each give and take just as much as the other person. I don't think any relationship is equal in that sense. But, I wanted to be treated fairly and not accorded a certain status or roles because of my gender.

When you are getting to know someone (or perhaps I should say when I am getting to know someone), I want to find out what makes them tick as soon as possible to make sure that I am not wasting my time with someone who I would be utterly incompatible with. So invariably out comes the BS detector and the barrage of questions start. Would you want your wife to work? What are you looking for in a woman? Do you think that the woman should do all the housework? Really, and you expect her to hold down a full-time job? How? Do you plan on splitting the housework with your wife? Do you think that the man is the head of the household? Do you expect your girlfriend/wife to submit to you?
Yes, I know, talk about unsubtle.

Somehow, this police cell style interrogation never yielded really positive results. The guy would think I was crazy and I would think that he was a Neanderthal.

Overtime though, you tend to mellow out. It does not mean that you still do not hold your principles dear, but you are less judgemental about other peoples' questioning of them. The same thing happened with the story's narrator. She did find someone who wasn't threatened by her beliefs, but who wasn't afraid to challenge them either. They did have their occasional fighting matches, but no relationship is perfect.

Last night I was reading the new issue of Genevieve. One of the articles asks women what they want from life: marriage; career; both; neither? I don’t know if they just happened to pool a very unusual set of women. They all wanted both (and not just because of financially motivations either). Most wanted to get married at some point, but were cool if it didn’t happen. This was unusual for me to hear. The (still) common idea of Nigerian women is that they care very much about marriage, want it badly and, after a certain age, would pounce on a man, any man as long as he is still breathing, okay looking, has an okay job and all limbs intact. And although things are changing, I think this way of thinking still prevails. Understandably, I suppose, with society’s incredibly strong pressure towards 'traditional' norms like marriage and family.

So what to do when you do want to be with someone but have principles that you cannot compromise? Well, that’s a really difficult question to answer. Life is messy and complicated and frankly we all have to compromise at some point or the other. For me, I’m finding that chilling out a bit and seeing what someone has to offer without tearing apart their every word and action in order to reveal its hidden meaning works (and not to mention, kinder on my stress level).