International Women’s Day (IWD) celebrated on the 8th of March every year is a global day set aside to bring attention to and celebrate the social, political, economic and cultural achievements of women through the years.
The theme for the celebrations this year, “Each for equal”, is aimed at creating awareness on the importance of gender equality. Specifically, the intention was to celebrate women’s achievements and increase visibility while calling out inequality.
LTWP has, since inception, worked intentionally to ensure female representation in the company while ensuring the respect and adherence to the cultural norms of the communities in and around the wind farm. We are proud that we have female representation in senior, mid-level and other levels within the organisation.
As we marked Women’s Day 2020, we took time to reflect on the journeys of different female colleagues within the organisation in climbing their career ladders, challenges and lessons they faced along the way and advice they would give their younger selves if presented with the opportunity. We spoke about the political, cultural, educational and gender-based bottlenecks that make it difficult for women in our cultural and geographical settings to achieve their full potential and how these challenges can be overcome in a bid to create an equal and gender-balanced world for ourselves, our sisters and our daughters.
To make the event even more relevant, LTWP, working with our medical services provider ResponseMed, organised a health and wellness check for all the ladies from LTWP, our contractors and project partners working at the wind farm.
These celebrations marked the beginning of a journey towards addressing the challenges our female colleagues face and our efforts to create an environment that celebrates and enables our female colleagues to succeed and thrive.