The Community Leadership Development Programme (CLDP)
The CLDP is a programme under The Trust that caters for women in both rural and urban areas, particularly those in leadership positions with the aim of empowering them to actively participate in community development and increase gender awareness.
Under this programme focus is on community level development. The activities carried include women’s rights awareness campaigns; gender based training workshops for local authorities, councillors and the district young women leaders together with their community facilitators; training of trainers’ workshops; commemoration of annual events like the International Women’s Day, among others.
The activities mentioned above are meant to equip women with civic education, such as good governance issues and leadership. The women are thus capacitated in the community such that they are able to articulate their needs and demand services from their local councils. Their knowledge can lead to the development of their communities.
A typical example is the project that is being carried out by the women from the Mutoko district. The community facilitator and young women leader together with the community women, who were trained by The Women’s Trust, are in the process of registering a housing co-operative for women. This is an initiative to enable women from the district to own houses and increase their access to resources and ownership.
The CLDP engages the services of the community facilitators and young women leaders whose main responsibility is to mobilize the local women to take part in the programmes offered by The Women’s Trust.  The community facilitators and young women leaders of the districts are the mediators between local authorities and the community women at large.
For gender development to occur at community level, the CLDP programme officers work closely with female councillors and the local authorities (chief executive officers, town clerks, and district administrators). They are taken through training on gender mainstreaming, leadership and personal empowerment to enable them to be assertive enough to participate and engage in decision making.
 The awareness helps them identify how, as local authorities, they can represent women where it matters, for example in council meetings. The training is for local authorities to appreciate gender mainstreaming and work towards service delivery for women in their communities. The involvement of such influential figures is done as a way of increasing the women’s participation and coming up with ways of improving their positions.
During the training, communities develop action plans. From this point, the local authorities and the community facilitators and the young women leaders share the plans with the community women for purposes of validation and implementation. They are also responsible in taking the lead in the projects and encouraging the women to take part during the mobilization meetings.
At the mobilization meetings the women get a chance to learn and share their experiences and challenges. Some of the rights issues covered during these meetings are the rights to good health, reproduction, access to health services, life, access to ownership and property, economic empowerment, work and education, identity - for example birth certificates and passports.
To kick start the year 2010, the CLDP in January conducted an orientation meeting for councillors on gender mainstreaming. The programme has been working tirelessly in its goal to improve the women’s level of active participation in governance and leadership.