LAHORE, Feb 21: President Gen Pervez Musharraf will inaugurate the political school for women councillors and address their national convention at Islamabad on March 20.
This was stated by Women Political Participation Project Manager Brig Shafqat Mahmood (retired) on Saturday. He was speaking at the district government seminar on women in politics, organised by the Ministry of Women Development at the Jinnah Hall here.
He said that special train would carry 600 councillors from all parts of the country from Karachi to Lahore and then to Islamabad for attending the convention.
The women would not be imparted political education at the Islamabad school but at designated places in their own districts. The school would chalk out the programmes for training 3,000 women councillors in code of conduct, communication skills, advocacy and other matters for every year and despatch master trainers to the districts.
As many as 200 master trainers and another 200 probationer trainers were available for conducting the training programmes. The project aimed at increasing the number to 600. The project had trained 27,000 women councillors out of 32,000 so far.
Women councillors had 40,000 seats in the district, town or tehsil and union councils in 96 districts in the country. Of these 4,000 had been elected by proxy by the feudal lords and by providing only their national identity card numbers but were not allowed to participate in the union council meetings. Men represented them in such meetings.
The project was establishing a network of 7,000 women councillors for knowing and solving their problems. The councillors from 6,022 union councils would apprise the town or tehsil of their problems and they would ask the district councillors to redress their grievances.
The project was compiling the data of the women councillors for developing their website.
District Naib Nazim Farooq Amjad Mir, who presided over, said that the government had made an attempt to bring a change in the social attitudes and end the monopoly of a handful of families on politics by introducing the district governments system.
He said that the councillors should not only be imparted political training but the training to become good human beings as well.Executive District Officer (Community Development) Zahid Aziz Khan said that the local governments system had expedited the pace of development.
The concept of citizen community boards had been introduced to facilitate community participation in development.
The local councils,tehsil or town administrations and district governments were required to reserve 25 per cent development funds for development projects to be executed through community participation. Even the opponents of the groups in power could get their development projects executed by forming their citizen community boards.
The councillors and government servants could not become the members of such boards.
MPA Shaheena Asad said that the women political participation project training had enabled her to get the first bill moved by a woman member adopted by the Punjab Assembly.
Lahore District Council members Rabia Khan and Nighat Ara, Gujranwala District Council member Perveen Sheikh said that the training provided by the project had given confidence to the woman councillors throughout the country, 79 per cent of whom had been elected for the first time in their lives and 50 per cent were illiterate.
A committee comprising a woman union council member, a woman town council member and a woman district council member was constituted to receive the complaints of woman councillors regarding the problems which could be solved without spending money and make efforts for solving the same.