Women's Empowerment Project - Mansfield Center

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The Women’s Empowerment Project

Montana – Cambodia – Laos – Thailand – Vietnam

Montana Women Visiting Asia

(click to view slideshow)

For a personal account of what it's like traveling in Asia, check out the blog

by WEP participant Elizabeth Harrison.

Enjoy this story of Tammy and Gwen’s engagement with students in Kampong Cham. The article is posted on the Embassy’s website http://cambodia.usembassy.gov/

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Meet Some of our WEP Participants

Ms. Siwanoot SOITONG
Attorney, Human Rights and Development Foundation
Bangkok, Thailand
Ms. Soitong will be a participant in the second cohort of the project. In the film clip from January 2012, she discusses her work and interest in participating in the Women's Empowerment Project.

Ms. NGUYEN Thi Thanh Trung
Project Officer, Centre for Creative Initiatives in Health and Population
Hanoi, Vietnam
Ms. Nguyen will be a participant in the second cohort of the project. In the film clip from January 2012, she discusses her work and project objectives.

The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center (MC) of The University of Montana (UM) is honored to host a program of the U.S. Department of State, the Women’s Empowerment Exchange Program for Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, with a focus on increasing local capacity and connectivity. Program themes include but are not limited to the environment, economic development, health, safety, security, strong families and education.

In our program, 20 English-speaking Southeast Asian women and 20 Americans will travel to a partner country as one of four cohorts between spring 2012 to winter 2013. Foreign participants will engage in a 37-day program in the U.S., while U.S. participants will travel to one Southeast Asian country for a two-to-three week program, depending upon individual availability.

The program offers a hands-on approach to shared issues in women’s leadership and tools to maximize the potential of technology. The program features the development of an action plan created by each Southeast Asian participant with the assistance of a U.S. partner to advance the project goal which is teaching emerging leaders to engage in collaborative action to address women’s concerns that have global repercussions.

A key aspect of the program is empowering women by providing them with the skills needed to increase local capacity and connectivity. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stated, "...there is no question that the spread of cell phones has launched a new era of possibility in the fights against poverty, disease, hunger, corruption, and political oppression...[But] to have a wide impact, the technology must be widely available, and for 300 million women in low- and middle-income countries the technology is still out of reach."

Our foreign and Montana partners join us in this opportunity to demonstrate how women in business, civil society, and government can cooperate effectively and how our approaches might be adapted to participants’ native environments.