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Fatimah Kelleher

“The Gender section is doing amazing work. It is cutting edge and other organisations and Commonwealth countries recognise what we are doing.”

Fatimah KelleherFatimah Kelleher's experiences with the Commonwealth Secretariat both abroad and at home have had a lasting positive impact on her.

She has worked as a Programme Officer in the Social Transformation Programmes Division for the past two years. During this time she has been involved in a number of projects which have taken her to several Commonwealth countries including Uganda, India and Namibia.

I don't want to romanticise the travel but it is certainly an opportunity to meet a wide variety of people and to work directly on the ground. You spend a lot of time in the office making grand plans, but until you go to the country itself, you have no idea how that plan will work."

Fatimah says that the Gender section tackles key  issues facing Commonwealth countries such as the most recent work she has been involved in, which is the Gender, Poverty Eradication and Economic Empowerment Programme.

Some of the projects which Fatimah says have made her work so rewarding include taking forward the Division's work on gender and trade, gender responsiveness in setting government budgets, and also being part of the team helping to plan the 8th Women's Affairs Ministers Meeting in June 2007.

During her first fourteen months in the education section, Fatimah says that one initiative that really stands out is the project which focused on education for nomadic populations in Africa. This was a collaborative effort with ComSec, Unicef and the Commonwealth of Learning.

"This was the first time that I know of that a regional conference was held in Garissa - amongst a nomadic community in Kenya's northeastern province - to discuss this very important issue. It's a serious challenge in several countries across Africa and providing education for children from mobile communities deserves more attention."

Fatimah has been in the gender section for 10 months, but already she has played a part in several of the main initiatives in the economic empowerment portfolio.  

Currently, the gender section is working on a project in Pakistan to provide more direct market access for rural women handicraft workers. Fatimah says they have found that female artisans, who produce some of the most beautiful and intricate handicrafts on the local market, are often not getting fair rates of return for their work.  

"What we're trying to do is look at ways to cut out the middlemen by building the institutional capacity of the rural support programmes and  teaching the women how to not only be market responsive artisans, but also good businesswomen, so that they can sell their goods directly to the both the national and international markets." 

Fatimah says that's what she likes most about ComSec, is the opportunity to help improve, even if it is in a small way, the quality of life for the millions of Commonwealth citizens.