Talk:Botswana Girl Guides Association

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	Botswana Girl Guides Association is part of the Scouting WikiProject, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Scouting and Guiding on the Wikipedia. This includes but is not limited to boy and girl organizations, WAGGGS and WOSM organizations as well as those not so affiliated, country and region-specific topics, and anything else related to Scouting. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
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	Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting task force

[edit] http://www.gov.bw/cgi-bin/news.cgi?d=20030220

Declining interest in girl guides regrettable 20 February, 2003

President Festus Mogae has expressed regret at the decline in girl guides and girl scouts’ activities at a time when there has been a phenomenal increase in challenges facing the youth.

The president was officially opening the 27th Africa region committee meeting of the Girl Guides Association in Gaborone on February 18. Mogae praised the association for its efforts in fighting HIV/AIDS and building peace among children world-wide.

“The success of initiatives you have undertaken require mobilisation of a cross-section of society so that people can recognise the benefits of such initiatives as their own. “This is a challenge that entails the intensification of membership drive and creating greater interest of the private sector in the activities of the girl guides and girl scouts with a view to developing partnerships,” he said.

Mogae said it was vital that adults should come forward to “serve as guide leaders, volunteer more of their time and engage young people in activities that can contribute to the restoration of the mass appeal which the movement enjoyed in the past”.

He said the establishment of the girl guides and scouts association recognised the beauty, energy and intellect in young people and committed itself to doing something to ensure the youth not only realised their fullest potential, but also enjoyed their youthful years in a responsible manner.

“One of the greatest assets of organisations, such as yours, is that you do not spend too much time making long statements and debating resolutions; you have been exemplary in taking action-oriented approaches to human challenges such as health care, HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention,” he said.

Nigeria-based Africa region’s chairperson Olayinka Olaniyan told the gathering that the World Association of Girl Guides and Scouts (WAGGGS) had 10 million members in 144 countries. “It’s a progressive, non-political organisation based on spiritual values, duty to one’s country and service to others.

“The mission of WAGGGS is to enable girls and young women to develop their fullest potential as responsible citizens of the world. WAGGGS is open to all girls and young women without distinction of creed, race, nationality or any other circumstance,” she added.

Olaniyan said dynamic and flexible non-formal education programmes, which develop girls and young women personally, spiritually and socially, were provided.

The programmes built a foundation in leadership skills that prepared them to play active role in living, working and shaping a healthy and balanced future world.

“By bringing young people of different races and cultures together girl guiding encourages peaceful co-existence in a world of diverse culture, violence and tension,” Olaniyan said.

Emphasising that the region faced challenges of disease, ignorance, poverty, and racial tensions, she said effort must be made to empower young women to contribute their quota to the development of their communities by tackling health, literacy and environmental issues.

Over the next four days the committee, comprising representatives from Botswana, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, South Africa and Australia, will review and evaluate guiding activities in Africa. The team will also review strategies on how to achieve the goal of improving the quality of guiding, increase membership and make impact on the community.

[edit] http://www.unites.org/html/projects/botswana.htm

UNV Volunteers, volunteers from George Mason University, and others serving under the UNITeS coalition, have undertaken a range of activities in Botswana, including supporting the national Botswana WorLD programme to introduce ICT tools for improved learning in a group of secondary schools, training the staff of the Botswana Girl Guides Association and its affiliates on using basic communication and computer skills, and supporting an organization that provides technology resources to allow people to access and utilize information in pursuit of learning about entrepreneurship development.

The World Links for Development Program (WorLD) Programme, managed by the World Bank, helped countries to develop sustainable solutions for mobilizing the equipment, training, educational resources and school-to-school partnerships required to bring students in developing countries online and into the global community. Through ICT, it linked students and teachers in secondary schools in developing countries with their counterparts in industrialized countries and elsewhere, for collaborative research, teaching and learning projects. In Botswana, UNITeS supported the national WorLD programme, in close collaboration with the Ministry of Education, with an international UNV, acting as an ICT technical specialist, assisting in the technical coordination strategy for all the WorLD schools in the country, establishing a timeline for operations, and setting communication links between regions and identifies equipment and connectivity options.

Within the framework of the UNITeS/ WorLD Links for Development Programme, volunteers from George Mason University assisted in the training and development of representatives from UNITeS/ WorLD-assisted schools in all technical-related aspects of the programme. This included establishing communication links between the schools, designing school websites, identifying various Internet connectivity options and recommending appropriate ICT equipment for the schools. One volunteers served as the ICT Intern for the Ministry of Education (February - March 2002).

Two volunteers from George Mason University trained the staff of the Botswana Girl Guides Association and its affiliates, and the staff, leaders and members of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), on using basic communication and computer skills. The volunteer offered support to the organization through developing the website, identifying appropriate ICT facilities to improve systems of communication, and preparing promotional materials for the resource mobilization efforts (June - August 2002).

Enterprise Botswana (EB) provides technology resources to allow clients to access and utilize information in pursuit of learning about entrepreneurship development. A volunteer from George Mason University assisted in managing the creation and the content of EB's web presence through gathering content for the site and creating documents and graphics to implement on the web. The volunteer managed the web server's storage of files and directory structure, providing training on the above mentioned (February - May 2002).