Today 60 women chose to lead by example when they accepted an offer to become mentors for young girls. The mentoring program was a recommendation coming out of last month's women's summit. It will be implemented through the Women's Department and the Youth Enhancement Services. Step one was taken this morning when 50 women from a broad cross section of the community were invited to a mentoring forum. 60 women showed up and National Women's Commission member Dolores Balderamos Garcia explains what'll be step two.
Dolores Balderamos-Garcia, National Women's Commission
"We really need to have women who have arrived somewhat to give back to the community by encouraging more young girls to really make more of themselves. We are looking at mentoring from the point of view of many factors; We need more women in politics and decision making, we need more young girls coming forward and themselves achieving so that we can have more development in our country and so we really felt as a commission and as the Women's Department that we wanted not only to talk about it as we did at the Women's Summit but to do something about it.
This is an introduction and a general discussion and then Ms. Dillet has already pledged that she will continue the training of the persons who make the commitment to become mentors today. We have a bumper attendance of over 60 people today as you can see and that is extremely encouraging. Many of them have already made the commitment but we hope that perhaps by the end of the session we would have 25 to 30 women who will be able to make the commitment to the training because its not an overnight thing. We believe that even though we have other troubles in our country, we do have the difficultly of young men who need attention, we feel that still our young women are more at a disadvantages and if we want to develop Belize in the correct way, we need our young girls to come forward."
