Report on Young Women’s Seminar
Our second annual Young Women’s Seminar was held on the 17th of October 2009 at the ABC Chapel in Malawi, Africa.
Overall, the conference could be considered a great success! I would like to break it down for you guys to give you a clear picture of everything.
Pre Conference stages- Planning and logistics
As you might have known, there were five of us working to put things together, namely Catherine Mloza Banda, Shonduri Manda, Keneoe Ngulube, Alinafe Kwilimbe and Wanangwa Gondwe. Catherine graduated from Bunda College in September this year. Keneoe is a graduate of ABC while the rest are still studying at ABC.
The objective of the conference was to encourage the young ladies to emerge as people of influence within their communities. After some brainstorming, we saw that one of the greatest weaknesses of the young women in our generation was the inability to see themselves as givers but as recipients. Most young women, whether Christian or not, are tied down by inferiority, fashion, low self esteem, self inflicted mistakes and cultural perceptions that in the end keep them from being what God intended them to be. We therefore wanted to tackle issues that affect us as young women and eventually keep us from being leaders, or at least role models.
Out of this, we derived our theme: ‘ON YOUR MARKS, GET SET, GO!!!’, an imagery of how one can eventually be the person you were created to be. We have attached a booklet of the lecture notes we used so you can catch a glimpse of how we did our sessions and everything.
We planned to invite 70 people of which more than 50 were communicated.
Our budget was pegged at MK 14 000. As you know, money is never enough. We had to do some re allocations. Eventually, everything was covered and we left no outstanding balance.
During the Conference
The conference was a success. The theme and sessions turned out to be relevant to the listeners. The main problem however, was time. We arranged everything on time and by 13:30, which was the starting time, we were ready to get things going. Unfortunately, the first participant came around 14:10. The next came in around 14:20. We had to wait to somewhere around 14:45 to start and at that time, we had about 25 participants seated. We therefore had to cut our sessions short because we only had about 2 hours left.
We photocopied the notes we were using so everyone could take a copy back home.
Post Conference
One girl actually came out and asked to talk with some of us in the team about her life. We took that as an achievement on our side. We still however have to do some follow ups in the near future once we et organized. We also will have to see if we can strategize on holding another seminar since it seemed the young women liked it.
Overall, I could say we had fun and we’ve learned a lot even as the taskforce.
Regards,
Catherine
