LEMHs

The Leadership Economic Mentorship Hubs (LEMHs) is a young women’s holistic lead-ership programme where a number of young women(LEMHsters) are accepted into the programme and begin a 1 year leadership and mentorship journey at the hub. These hubs are hosted in various provinces to afford atleast 80% young women (and 20% young men in some instances) at each enrolment, an opportunity to earn leadership skills. Building from past experiences, this mentorship programme is a more structured process with three stages that run through the year to provide leadership capacity building, networking support, resourcing and platforms for dialogue with leaders to push for their issues. The young women include both those in tertiary institutions, young women in communities who are victims or survivors of gender based violence forms such as child marriages, sexual abuse and family heads ages 16 to 24. A few young women above 24 years maybe accepted into the programme depending on their situations.

The 20 day (once a week) leadership training running every Saturday will include topics from our seven thematic areas such as Financial literacy, Gender and power, citizenry rights, hu-man rights, advocacy, understanding the constitution and using the law to defend human rights, democracy fundamentals, gender & gender based violence(GBV), Feminism, En-gaging Media, confidence building, advocacy, grooming and etiquette, public speaking, project planning, Sexual Reproductive Health Rights of young people, HIV prevention and management, basic Information Technology skills (ICTs) including blogging, Climate Change and Environment, Elevator pitching and networking among others. The girls will be encouraged to identify a thematic area of choice amongst these to belong to for future en-gagements.

During their training, the girls are expected to identify a leadership problem linked to what they will learn so that once trained they will go back and implement it exhibiting their leadership skills under our community programme “Youths Engaging Local Leaders – YELL”. The girls will end their training programme with a graduation to be attended by relevant ministers and dignitaries. The event will serve as a platform for the young people to interact with their leaders as well as be fur-ther exposed to opportunities to help them dream and work hard.

The young women benefit from peer mentorship, and are also assigned mentors who are success-ful leaders from various walks of life including business, politics, civil society, women and men whose role is to mentor them in their professional, community work and personal goals. These mentors do not only provide guidance but also link the young women with other developmental and career opportunities.

The hubs housed at the TaLI offices provide the young leaders continued support for research, ac-cess to internet, computers, networking, peer support and movement building amongst them-selves and their communities. They will carry out developmental conversations and dialogues with policy makers across the various issues that they care about according to their thematic areas supported by TaLI. The young women are exposed to great networking within the country, in the region and internationally as TaLI is part of various networks and coalitions across the world.