by Eligrania Lema, Binti Shupavu Project Manager
It is not only Kisa Scholars who are mentored! AfricAid Mentor training occurs once a year. This fall, from September 12-16, exciting new trainers from various backgrounds brought a diversity of knowledge to a group of 17 participants who are engaged in Girls Education & Empowerment in Tanzania. Our 9 Kisa Mentors learned about the joys of mentoring on both professional and personal levels: what it really means to be a mentor, participatory teaching methods, communication and team work. The participating organizations that shared their organizational culture and approaches were Girls Foundation, Femme International and AfricAid.
Our amazing training coordinator Anande Nnko first required every participant to suggest topics to be covered. Everyone was really open about topics they loved to know more about and perhaps areas of self-improvement. This led to some of the best topics we have ever had in a mentor training, including learning about working as a team with different personalities and using those different dynamics to strengthen our team. In addition to learning the content from the powerful presenters, we witnessed effective presentation skills. For new and experienced Kisa Mentors alike, the body language and tone of voice were examples to be modeled.
One main theme from this year’s mentor training was that mentoring is not limited to just the work place. We can also mentor the girls in our church groups or even our younger siblings and neighbors in our home communities. We all got to hear what our personalities were from our team members, as well as the positive contributions we make and how appreciated we are. We also discovered that we have the ability to dictate our job performance in terms of meeting deadlines and handling stressful situations while maintaining enthusiasm for the possibility of achieving anything and everything we pursue.
This training has truly left the new mentors feeling incredibly energized and the older mentors fully charged to work harder and better.
