SASEWA Planning Evaluation and Leadership Workshop

In August, 2015  in Durban, South Africa, WIEGO facilitated a planning, evaluation, and leadership workshop for SASEWA leadership and 17 home-based worker members. The workshop focused on evaluating SASEWA’s organizational plans, reflecting on organizing lessons learned, enhancing leadership skills, and training to strengthen the organization as a whole.

During the two-day workshop, some key organizational lessons emerged:

• As the founding leaders reflected on the founding principles and vision of building a strong association of self-employed women in South Africa, they also taught the new members about the history of the organization.
• Participants were able to do a basic organizational analysis of its history, current status and potential future development.
• Amid occasionally tense discussions, the importance of maintaining democratic practice in membership-based-organizations was raised, maintaining the regular functioning of democratic structures and the importance of active and full membership participation in the life of the organization.

These were some of the expectations that participants expressed at the beginning of the workshop:

• Ideas for growing the organization to be stronger.
• Knowledge of how to solve problems in our organization.
• Knowledge of how to help other home-based workers.
• Commitment to work harder and build the team spirit in SASEWA.

Everyone left with a renewed vigour to organize and strengthen SASEWA for future generations.