Professor Deborah Cai, STRC, spent five days in Rome this spring in an effort to help a group of government workers from Afghanistan improve their gender communication and leadership skills.

From May 23 to 27, she and a team from Women’s Campaign International trained 25 Afghanistan government employees as part of a seven-week program organized by the Italian Foreign Ministry that covered topics such as public policy and project management. The participants – both men and women – were from government departments such as Justice, Agriculture, Women Affairs and more.

“My primary role was to cover gender and intercultural communication — talk about being a competent communicator, how to build trust, types of personal power we can have and how to develop them — and then to work with the students on public speaking — how to project, how to organize a speech, and how to deliver it,” Cai says.

Other WCI trainers covered leadership and managing the media, while Marjorie Margolies, president of WCI, and Valerie Biden Owen, who creates political campaign ads for radio and television, talked about crisis management in the workplace and delivering messages effectively through the media.

The training sessions helped the civil servants create five-year plans and develop speeches about their personal visions for their work in Afghanistan. They shared their speeches and critiqued one another on their delivery.

“The Italian Foreign Ministry see this training as one way to bring about long term change within Afghanistan, by working with those that work in the government to help them learn how to do what they do better and to gain a vision for the future,” Cai said. In December, she and her WCI colleagues trained diplomats from Afghanistan on similar topics.

Cai noted that the women in the class were particularly interested in learning more about the trainers and their abilities to balance their personal and professional lives to achieve success.