The Iraq Leadership Fellows (ILF) Program 2019-2020 was launched on Friday, November 22, 2019, starting with its first workshop. The four-day workshop, hosted at the American University of Iraq, Sulaymaniyah (AUIS), was attended by forty-eight fellows. The fellows were selected from four-hundred applicants, who applied for both tracks of the program: Social Activist Track and Political Candidate Track.

The workshop involved extensive training on advocacy and public speaking with consultants from the ILF team. It also included engaging discussions with experts about democracy and Iraq’s political process after 2003, wealth management in petrostates, reconstruction of liberated areas, and civil society in Iraq.

The above-mentioned workshop is the first in a series of three workshops that will run until June 2020, to equip the fellows with cutting-edge skills to lead the positive change in Iraq. For the third year in a row, the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS) is implementing the ILF initiative with continuous support and funding from Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung and DT Institute.