Girls Wanna Run! Training Nepal's Generation Next!

The second part of the 2018 Young Women’s Political Leadership Institute focused on political activism. Through bi-monthly workshops and advocacy projects, YWPLI Fellows learned about Nepal’s power structures and how these can be used to influence change.They also discussed the barriers to a well-functioning democracy and designed projects to address the main hurdles that they identified. Simran and her friends chose to focus on women’s political participation and their art installation, called the Political Women of Nepal was visited by more than 60 young people.

Through our advocacy project, we showcased the journey of successful female leaders to inspire other young women to join politics. In total, our group interviewed ten women and collected photographs to represent their personal and political lives. We then created an art installation to show their life story and the turning points that led them to pursue a career in politics. The idea was to give young women visiting the exhibition someone they could relate to and be inspired by. We hope that our message was clear: politics is not an inaccessible world!

All of the women I interviewed were amazing. They each had a unique and invaluable perspective on politics and I’ve learned so much from the lessons and experiences they have acquired through their lifetime. It was hard to choose just one, but I decided to highlight in this report Binda Pandey, a labor activist and member of the Constituent Assembly because of the impact her work had for women in Nepal.

Binda Pandey was one of the few female politicians involved in the writing of Nepal’s new Constitution. She confessed that adopting laws to promote gender equality wasn’t an easy process. It took a lot of effort, perseverance, and the use of clever tactics to pass progressive laws, like the one that set gender quotas in political representation. Her perseverance paid off though and now Nepal has the most progressive Constitution in South Asia in terms of gender equality! I was lucky to receive her recipe for a successful career in politics: a strong ideology, a sound knowledge of the topic you are advocating for, strong communication and debating skills, the ability to build networks, and most importantly resilience!

I didn’t realize at the beginning of the project how much I would gain from talking with these successful politicians. They shared their life lessons with us and I got a glimpse of the types of challenges that I may face in the future. My biggest takeaway from this project was to seize every opportunity that comes my way and get out of my comfort zone, starting with giving a speech at the YWPLI graduation ceremony!