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March 10 and 11 were exciting days at Aid to Artisans. We launched our first distance learning training program.
This training marked the first of Aid to Artisans Distance Learning initiatives, which we plan to greatly expand so that we reach many more artisans using the Internet. We are in the process of also launching an Aid to Artisans virtual university that will offer our training modules online in 8 languages to artisans anywhere in the world.
Our first client using this distance learning program was the U.S. State Department. On March 10 – 11 we led a virtual training session with Iraqi women at the U.S. Embassy, and became the first organization to ever lead a distance learning training there. Using webcams, and Adobe technology and an Arabic translator provided by the U.S. State Department, we were able to virtually chat with a group of 9 Iraqi women entrepreneurs, some of them working with as many as 100 artisans. Several of these women were also war widows with children to feed, making it even more critical that they start learning the necessary skills needed to earn sustainable income from their craft businesses. Our goal was to teach these women essential business knowledge they need to sell their products in a free market economy, a completely new concept to them in Iraq’s post Saddam era.
The women included sewers, wood carvers and prominent business leaders. Throughout the training sessions, they learned skills we teach at our world acclaimed Market Readiness Program including costing and pricing, how to differentiate their products so they can sell to global consumers, how to tell their story and include details about Iraqi traditions, and a big one, how to use the Internet. Under Saddam’s rule, most Iraqis were forbidden to access IP addresses, so learning how to break into the World Wide Web is an entirely new experience for many of them.
