In the beginning of May, four women non-governmental organizations took part in joint workshop organized in the offices of Shelter Center in Skopje. The aim of the workshop was to promote the networking on local level in order to enhance the further mutual collaboration. Each of the organizations attending the workshop was represented by two participants.
During the workshop, majority of the participants stressed the importance of joint acting towards lobbying for the most burning issues in formal and informal networks for achieving more efficient results. They all agreed how that is important when it comes to writing and sending joint statements, protest letters and in general, lobbying for certain issues.
Project assistant, Nade Kachakova stresses that exchanging the experience and good practice regarding the common issues, is important in terms of improving the women’s position and unity in Macedonian society: “We are still in the process of defining the concrete women’s rights issues that will be included in the creation of the action plan which we will be using further on, for joint acting of women’s organizations at the local level”.
Since many of the organizations have a lot of experience during their work throughout years now, they also pointed out potential obstacles regarding the achievement of certain objectives, and as well offered certain methods to overcome them. Experience and information sharing during this workshop was significant for all four NGOs and it strengthened their readiness and willingness to work together more closely in the future regarding such issues.
The usefulness of this workshop was especially shown to those less experienced organizations and their activists, since more experienced NGOs at the workshop, disseminated information and promoted their capacities offering their help and cooperation to less developed women NGOs.
In the end, the general conclusion was that the most effective way of following each other’s track is to communicate more often, to get familiar through sharing the positive and negative experience, and to support each other through mutual actions regarding women human rights issues.
