BREAKING BOUNDARIES FOR WOMEN EMPOWERMENT

Breaking Boundaries for Women Empowerment

Kosova Women 4 Women had the opportunity to go back and travel to Shtërpcë as part of the ongoing and continuous partnership between KW4W and the United Nations Mission in Kosovo in the project Empowerment for Peace. The meeting, which took place in a magnificent forestry setting, had Women form both Albanian and Serbian descent come together and discuss the mechanisms by which they can use each other as a platform for mutual benefit. Given the geopolitical context of Kosovo's international status, KW4W is happy to break down ethnic and political walls to ensure that women in these rural communities can develop partnerships in the areas of social and economic empowerment. The program specifically focuses and helping strategize the formation of local agricultural cooperatives in which both Serbian and Albanian women work together to enhance their position in the market and ensure financial viability and sustainability. Despite the linguistic and cultural barriers, the women continuously ties to communicate with each other, strive for improvement, and become each other's greatest resource. Monitoring and Evaluation manager, Vesa Rezniqi-Pallaska led the seminar on improving communications and developing strategies and emphasize the need that these women "be active participants, work together to come up with the solutions and use each other as resources rather than wait to be told an answer. KW4W is glad to see such grassroots engagement form the participating women. The Empowerment for Peace project has become a pioneer in the region as a civil society initiative to encourage cross cultural cooperation, and the program hopes to cultivate these feelings of mutual appreciation to develop stronger agricultural cooperatives throughout the multicultural Kosovo.