Women’s World Banking’s Center for Microfinance Leadership is proud to be hosting the 2011 Women in Leadership Program for the Middle East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa from July 17 to 21, 2011 in Amman, Jordan.  We are delighted that Microfund for Women, a leading Jordanian microfinance institution and member of the WWB network, will be our local co-host for this program.

The program brings together 24 women from 15 microfinance institutions in 10 countries.

This course, delivered by Creative Metier an innovative UK-based company specializing in international leadership development, targets high potential women managers in microfinance institutions who have demonstrated the ability to lead people and who are considered to be the next generation of leadership in their organizations.

The course provides an opportunity for women leaders to analyze their leadership impact and plan their own development towards their leadership vision and goal. The program is designed to help participants increase their understanding of various models of leadership, gender and culture and use these as a foundation to define their own leadership values and vision, better understand their individual styles and preferences and identify behaviors that can help them implement their leadership vision. Participants also build key skills including giving and receiving feedback and how to successfully lead through difficult situations. Taking the individual as a starting point, the program encourages self-reflection, providing each woman leader with a clearer vision of her own leadership style, and how to achieve her personal leadership development objectives while taking into consideration the stakeholders, organizational culture and industry context in which she operates.

The participants also had the opportunity to learn from the real life leadership stories of three distinguished women leaders: Her Excellency Ms. Suhair Al-Ali, Senator, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Ms. Caroline Drees, Managing Editor, Middle East and North Africa for Thomson Reuters news agency and Ms. Raghda Kurdi, Chairman and General Manager of Pharmaserve.

The program places a strong emphasis on developing peer networks and skills to build and maintain mutually challenging and supportive relationships with other women leaders. Peer mentoring for leaders is a critical strategy to leverage the knowledge of practitioner experts who, though operating in distinctive markets and contexts often face a similar set of challenges. “At WWB I have become so engaged in fostering leadership and particularly women’s leadership. In this role I place a strong emphasis on mentorship and on peer mentorship because very often we can gain the deepest support from our peers,” says Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women’s World Banking.

Participants complete the five day workshop with an individualized plan for implementation of their vision, tools to evaluate their success and the peer support to actualize their aspirations.

The Women’s Leadership Development Program was first launched in late 2005 to respond to the declining numbers of women in the senior ranks of WWB’s network members. The program focused on training senior women or those who were positioned to succeed into those ranks. WWB and its network members identified highly motivated, high potential women managers from within the organizations. These women were given access to a variety of leadership development, training and exchange opportunities to build their capacities as leaders.

WWB partnered with the internationally renowned Center for Leadership and Change Management at The Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, to design and deliver the original Women in Leadership course.

In 2008, building on the successful work of the first phase of the program, WWB expanded and strengthened the program’s goals to ensure that enabling environments exist for the attraction, retention and promotion of talented women staff at all levels of the institution through the Organizational Gender Assessment with select institutions. “We wanted to ensure that these newly empowered women leaders were going home to institutions that would support their growth,” says Elizabeth Lynch, Manager of the Center for Microfinance Leadership at WWB.  “Working at the institutional and individual levels provides a greater probability that we can effect real change in the profile of leadership in the microfinance industry.” 

The Center for Microfinance Leadership was founded in 2009 in response to critical changes in microfinance—increased commercialization, decreased presence of women staff at all levels of microfinance institutions, and rapid growth. These changes demand skilled, trained leaders and managers. This major initiative enables WWB to respond in a meaningful way to these two critical challenges: overall leadership capacity, and the diversity of the leadership and workforce of the industry. 

The Center holds the unique position in the industry of being the only provider of open programs at an international level for women who have the potential to take on senior leadership roles in the future. The stand that WWB and the Center take on gender issues, through initiatives such as the Leadership Excellence Award, awarded on a yearly basis to a member of the WWB network demonstrating overall excellence and innovative approaches to workforce diversity, delivery of high quality research, advocacy and the unique Organizational Gender Assessment supporting institutional diversity. A systematic focus on leadership, social mission and diversity issues across this integrated suite of offerings run through all of the Center’s programs.