On October 25-28, 2007, “SADP Leadership Training for Inner Mongolia Women Officials” was held at Tianze Hotel, Hohhot. Participants of this training session came from SADP Project, SFAGM Project, project areas funded by International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), as well as women’s federations at different levels in Inner Mongolia, including 26 female participants who are women officials of agricultural and animal husbandry departments, women technicians, women in charge of the activities of fields schools, women in charge of the farmers’ cooperative organizations, as well as women representatives of project pilot households.

Since its implementation, SADP has always paid great attention to women’s important role in agriculture, and taken it as a very important part of project activities to improve women’s social status, develop women’s job skills and increase women’s awareness of participation. Many training sessions for women’s leadership skills have been conducted in all project provinces, and in the office of each project province there is a gender focal point that is in charge of gender equality work in agriculture in the local province.

This training session was jointly sponsored by SADP and Inner Mongolia Department of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry. Zhao Jie and Wen Yiqun, both being research fellows of Gender & Participatory Work Section of Yunnan Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, were invited to introduce the gender mainstreaming framework of SADP at the training session. They gave a detailed explanation of the basic knowledge of gender equality and the basic concepts of women’s leadership, analyzed the advantages and characteristics of women leaders, as well as how to exploit women’s leadership skills. Also, they elaborated how to understand rural women’s needs and how to advocate gender awareness among rural women. At the end, Zhao Jie and Wen Yiqun introduced all the activities of gender equality and sustainable development sponsored by SADP.

The 4-day training session not only built up a close friendship between trainers and trainees, but also enabled the trainees to know how to increase farming women’s gender awareness and how to raise their leadership skills. The participatory method ran through the whole training session, making it possible for the trainees to learn in the practice and in a light-hearted atmosphere. Many trainees said that they had never before participated in such a training session in which trainers and trainees conducted equal and interactive dialogue, and the learning contents were all fresh. Everybody was active to participate, and was willing to bring what they had learnt into their future work, hoping the China-Canada cooperation program to provide more training opportunities of this kind.