The Women Development Ministry and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have signed a $4.5 million grant aid programme "Women political school" for political education and training of women elected to political office in Pakistan.
The UNDP and Norwegian government are jointly supporting the programme.
The signing ceremony was held at the Women Development Ministry here on Tuesday. Special Adviser on Women Development Nilofer Bakhtiar, UNDP representative Onder Yucer and representatives of Economic Affairs Division (EAD) were also present on the occasion.
Women Development Ministry Secretary Sohail Safdar and UNDP Resident Representative Onder Yucer signed the programme.
Nilofer Bakhtiar said that women political school project would help in institutionalising the process of training women political leaders.
She said that the project would bring in changes within local political leadership and would help in capacity building of women politicians.
She said that programme would also help in empowering women politicians to use their public offices to raise the issues of women in future development policies.
She said that the project has been designed to sustain the gains of women political participation project, which was pioneering effort to train and nurture over 40,000 newly elected women councillors at the district, tehsil and union levels.
She said that the programme would provide reliable support network and system for women participating in the political process and would build institutional capacities of relevant government, civil society and training institutes.
Nilofer said that the project would focus equally on all the four provinces as well as the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (Fata) Northern Areas and FANA targeting 40,000 women councillors.
Onder Yucer said that the UNDP seeks partners for their future projects and invites other ministries, especially Women Ministry and Economic Affairs Division to join UNDP in "Gender support programme" for 2004-08.