VEC Equality for Women Conference in Mayo
VEC Equality for Women Conference in Mayo
At a two-day conference held in Mulranny in December, to celebrate the successful completion of the
WELL project, Dr. Katie Sweeney, CEO, Mayo VEC, announced the
outcome and keys findings of the Equality for Women project. In particular,
the project highlighted inequalities in the area of access to further
education for women who are not on the live register,
under the access requirements of further education and training provided
by government agencies. Many women who have remained in the
home as caretakers are not registered as unemployed. Therefore,
they are excluded from many sources of information, education and training.
While rural women may have leaving certificates, obtained many years
ago, these certificates do not provide them with the skills to re-enter
employment in a technological age. Women need to up-date their
skills if they are to have an opportunity to take up employment.
These findings indicate an urgent need for policy makers to recognise
the value of women who have remained in the home; women who have much
to offer to the social, economic, cultural and spiritual development
of their communities.
The conference, entitled WELL
– Women, Enterprise and Lifelong Learning was addressed by Cllr.
Teresa McGuire, Chairman of the Adult Education Board, Kathleen
Connolly, Head of the Gender Equality Unit, Dept. of Justice, Equality
and Law Reform, and Deirdre McHugh, Barrister, GMIT, Galway.
County Mayo VEC, were contracted to deliver two major projects in Co. Mayo over the coming year -- €190,000 Equality for Women Measure –- Clár Strand, funded by POBAL and a €100,000 Initiative for Lone Parents, funded by the NDP Gender Equality Unit through Mayo County Development Board.
Both are partnership projects
emphasising the co-operative developments within the County and collaboration
of service providers in the interest of equality, efficiency and flexibility.
The partners in The Equality
for Women Project are Women of the North West, Moygownagh, (North Mayo),
and The Tochar Valley Rural Community Network, (South Mayo). The
approach of this project was to support actions that redress the inequalities
of women living in poverty, unemployment or marginalised circumstances
and support them towards social and economic independence. This
can be further broken down into isolated rural women, women parenting
alone, women who are economic migrants and women with refugee status.
The Equality for Women Project
consisted of two separate programmes. An Education and Training
Support Programme will be delivered in South Mayo. Participants
in this group were women who have worked in the home or on the family
farm, who have had limited access to educational programmes, who wished
to build their personal and social skills and acquire confidence before
progressing to further education or training. The Equality for
Women programme in North Mayo focussed on Self-employment and Enterprise
Creation, where women who were interested in developing a business idea
were given an opportunity to explore the skills required to set up a
business which could be developed alongside other means of economic
activity, e.g. alternative farm enterprise, eco tourism etc.
