Thirty co-op educators and trainers (20 women and 10 men) attended the “AWCF Regional Training of Trainers (TOT) for Women Leaders Transforming Co-operatives” held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, October 2-6, 2007. Fund support came from MISEREOR, and host-organization was the Credit Union Promotion Club (CUPC), AWCF’s member-organization in Malaysia.

The participants came from nine organizations from seven Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member-states, including those from AWCF member-organizations. At this TOT activity, they were trained to appreciate and use AWCF’s recently developed advanced women leadership training manual that aims at educating aspirant women leaders and also women already in position, in order to further increase their representation and participation in leadership and decision-making bodies at the local, national and international levels of the co-op movement. These objectives are in furtherance of AWCF’s advocacy of transformative leadership (TL) that promotes co-op leadership that is development-oriented (DO), issue-focused (IF), and gender-sensitive (GS), thereby promoting the social and economic benefits of co-operativism to the highest possible level.

Since the manual is divided into three modules—“Examining and Developing Motivations to Run for Co-op Leadership,” “How to Win a Co-op Election,” and “Coping with Leadership Challenges”—the participants were assigned topics/sessions to demonstrate during the TOT. At the end of the training, the participants made an overall evaluation of the AWCF training manual vis-à-vis its topics and processes, serving as valuable inputs to the finalization of manual’s draft version, due for publication soon.

AWCF had published already a trainers’ manual on conducting TL in co-ops, and a TL adoption assessment manual to determine the extent to which co-ops have been practicing TL concepts and activities.