Published
03 October 2007, 06:37 AM
Last week I attended the Women’s International Networking (W.I.N.) Conference in Oslo. W.I.N. was founded in 1998 and aims at inspiring women worldwide by developing, empowering and connecting female leaders. This year’s annual global forum took place in Oslo under the motto “Taking the next step: fearless, graceful and together.”The W.I.N. Global Forum consists of plenary sessions and workshops. As this year was the 10th global forum the first session was dedicated to reviewing the last ten years and the progress of the corporate women and to discuss the next steps. I attended many very inspiring and interesting sessions (also see a recap of some of the sessions by Andrea Martins from Expat Networks. Mrs Tabatabai, from the International Labur Organization for example spoke about the issues of women in the developing world – and what we need to do to support them.
Gabi Zedlmayer, our VP for Global Citizenship and Corporate Marketing, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) held a keynote speech about how technology can help women in their careers and addressed the new Web 2.0 applications like RSS feeds, wikis, social networks, webcasts, podcasts, how to design your own deliverables on the web. Gabi of course also promoted our two flagship programmes addressing entrepreneurs, MAP and GET-IT in her speech. Some of our MAP and GET-IT centers focus specifically on training women.
My colleagues Jelena Godjevac, Jeannette Weisschuh and I held a workshop on our GET-IT programme and showed the female entrepreneurs the methodology of the curriculum and how the GET-IT curriculum is being delivered to the target group, under- or unemployed graduates.
To sum up the conference, I can say that world-class speakers touched issues around economy, politics, technology, society, environment, humanity and future, life and work. Most of the speeches touched on diversity and inclusion and I hope that concrete action items will be pursued from these fruitful conversations.
I admire the effort and work of Kristin Engvig who founded W.I.N. The annual conferences constitute a fantastic opportunity to meet women from all over the world and to exchange experiences. It inspired me personally to see 900 female leaders across the globe and I went home with a lot of interesting insights and ideas that I can implement.
I think this conference is as valuable as the actual action items that result out of this conference. I would hope that many fellow females did not only take this conference as a means to meet new people but to collaborate together for the best possible result.
I am already looking forward to the next conference and I hope I inspired the women amongst our blog readers to consider participating next year too.
Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments and Economic Development
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