A 3-days In-House training for counsellors was carried out from 15 – 17th April, 2025, in the VWC conference room, in Port Vila. 4 in-house trainings are planned and carried out during each financial year of the Vanuatu Women’s Centre (VWC). This training is the last training for the 2024/2025 financial year.
In-house trainings help to enhance counsellors’ knowledge in different areas of their work. Topics range from community education, legal information, and basic counselling skills. In 2024/2025 in-house trainings, the counsellors were very privileged to have a psychosocial worker, working with children in the Children’s Ward of the Vila Central Hospital, do training with them on how to work with traumatized children; UNFPA did a training with them on Case Management; UNICEF did a training on working with traumatized clients after disaster, including loss of loved ones, jobs, and so on.
The first day of the 15 – 17 April, 2025 In-house training, saw the counsellors go through their work documents such as face sheets, weekly sheets and so on to see the importance of properly filling them up, as they are interconnected, in terms of transfer of information. The second day saw the counsellors discussing difficult cases, and assisting each other in putting in ideas as to how to resolve them. This was a group supervision session. On the 3rd day, the counsellors were asked to demonstrate their facilitation skills and techniques by doing presentations on various topics, but not on domestic violence. This was a lead on from a previous session on facilitation skills and techniques. This training is deemed necessary as counsellors are advocates, and they need to learn these skills and techniques to supplement their basic counselling skills. Counsellors also do mobile counselling where they go into communities and do awareness talks on domestic violence, gender equality, Family Protection Law, Human Rights and other related topics. Therefore, these skills are necessary to do provide good quality awareness talks.
By enhancing their understanding in both counselling, community education and legal information, they will be able to provide quality counselling and support services to the survivors, and to effectively participate in various activities of VWC in achieving the VWC’s goal to end violence against women and girls in Vanuatu.