Please circulate

 

‘Communications Skills For Women In Politics’

 

A new manual from the KETHI Research Centre For Gender Equality.  Written by Lesley Abdela. 127 pages

 

Available in English, Greek, Hungarian and Bulgarian.

 

Funded by the European Union and the Greece’s Secretariat for Equality in the context of a European project titled ‘Parity In Decision-Making’.

 

Enquiries e-mail kethi@kethi.gr or Lesley Abdela, Senior Partner, Shevolution, on lesley.abdela@shevolution.com

 

 

Appropriately initiated by Greece, the birthplace of Democracy, and compiled by Lesley Abdela, one of the United Kingdom’s best-known experts on advocacy for parity in public life, Communication Skills For Women In Politics is aimed at women in newly-established or impending Democracies or women fresh to politics in existing Democracies.  It has been designed as a practical tool-kit for trainers to use in workshops for future women politicians and for training activists campaigning for a rapid increase in women’s participation in politics.

 

Lesley Abdela writes: ‘Until the world’s women reach at least the threshold of 30%+ in all the world’s Parliaments, women’s voices and opinions and skills will continue to be largely ignored or over-ridden by governments and the press and Media.  Of all the 9 muses in the ‘dark arts’ of politics, the ability to communicate with other human beings, including journalists, the public, and your own Party membership, the muse of Communication (the beautiful-voiced Calliope?) is one you have to follow to succeed.   Many women are natural, good communicators. This manual can help transport any woman’s talent for communication from the private to the public arena. Aspiring politicians who know how to communicate well have a better chance of getting chosen by a party to represent them as candidates in an election, and a far greater chance of persuading voters to elect them.’

 

Sections include:

 

‘They did this and it succeeded – Lessons Learned’

‘They did this and it succeeded: NGOs can make a difference’

‘They did this and it succeeded: Gender-balanced Quotas/Equalising Action’

‘They did this and it succeeded: Networks of women inside political parties’

 

Skills Workshops:

Public Speaking workshop/Constructive feed-back.

Media Interviews workshop.

Advocacy workshop.

 

Open Discussions:

The role of advocacy campaigners/universal principles of advocacy.

Good research makes your argument more effective.

Gender-proofing your advocacy campaigns.

 

Born in London (of Greek descent), Lesley Abdela herself stood for the UK Parliament and founded the all-Party 300 Group for Women in Politics.  She worked with Project Liberty, the Kennedy School Harvard, training hundreds of future women leaders in the former Soviet Union, from Poland to Romania, to Uzbekistan.  She has worked with the European Commission (Kosovo, Swaziland), the UK Department of International Development, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (OSCE Kosovo), USAID (Iraq, Afghanistan) and the United Nations worldwide, in South Asia and all regions of Africa and much of the Middle East. (See search engines such as Google under ‘Lesley Abdela’)

She is an adviser to governments on CEDAW. 

 

Translations into other languages welcomed.