Gender Project for Bulgaria

On February 24th and 25th Gender Project for Bulgaria Foundation organized a seminar: "Implementation of advocacy campaign - theory and practice", which was the official start of "Roma Women Win in Bulgaria" project, on PHARE program "Civil society development - 2004", funded by the European Union.

The goal of the project is improving the democratic process in Bulgaria through social integration of Roma community; capacity building of Roma non-government organizations and strengthening the role of Roma women in social and political life. The participants in the training have been selected by Gender for Bulgaria Foundation, through preliminary prepared criteria, in terms of the objectives of the project.

At the seminar there were 15 Roma women from 5 different non-government organizations - Association for Social, Cultural and Educational Development of Minorities in Bulgaria - Shumen, Ethnointegration Foundation - Dupnitsa, Association "Development and Support for Roma women and children" - Lom, Association of Roma Women and Children - Plovdiv and "KHAM - Slunce" Foundation - Kustendil, which is oficial partner of Gender Project for Bulgaria Foundation.

The basic seminar's aims were the participants to acquire teorethical knowledge and real skills on organizing successful advocacy campaign on a concrete issue. A focus was put into the main activities that should be planned on local level for successful inclusion of Roma women leaders in the political parties lists for municipality council members'and a real change to be achieved in local policy with accent on the problems of Roma women and Roma community.

In those two days the main steps for each advocacy campaign were discussed, as well as strategy planning specifics, mechanisms for making a coalition, accents in working with media and behavior in negotiations.

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