The Working Women’s Centre Timor-Leste has held a workshop to define their priority programs to empower and protect the rights of domestic workers, after the organization didn’t function for one year.
Board President of the Working Women’s Centre Timor-Leste (WWCTL) Lourenco Tito said at the start of the three-day workshop that they would thoroughly discuss their strategic plan for 2013 to 2016, so it wouldn’t fail in the future.
He said WWCTL was established in 2011 to give training and promote women’s rights, but their programs did not function for months because they had no concrete strategic plan.
According to him, this failure was an experience for the organization and now they could move forward to assist and build the capacity of vulnerable women.
“I think that over these three days we can set the focus of our strategic plan on overall objectives, like vulnerable women who are organized and have the capacity to fix their lives in the future,” said Board President Tito at the opening of the workshop in Balide, Dili.
Meanwhile representative of Australian People for Health and Education Development Abroad (APHEDA) Elisabeth Lino de Araujo said as donors they were always ready to support the activities of WWCTL, but they should set priority programs properly that would be implemented over the next three years.
“In the past, APHEDA was given a $65,000 budget from AusAid to give to WWCTL, but in reality they could not execute the $65,000, meanwhile now we’ve given $8000 for two years (2013-2014),” said the APHEDA representative.
She said she hoped the board’s commitment could move the organization forward to help achieve their mission and vision to support vulnerable women.
On the other hand, WWCTL Advocacy Coordinator Helven Alberto Benio said in the past they built the capacity of about 30 domestic workers in areas like cooking, ironing clothes, cleaning houses and looking after children.
He said basic research in Oe-Cusse, Baucau, Dili and Ermera districts found that workers needed to build their capacity and enhance their knowledge in specific areas.
“For this year our target is to aim for 500 people who will take part in training and the training we will give will be at basic, medium and high levels because most domestic workers didn’t complete school,” he said.
