There comes a time for everything, and in October it was time for the final meeting of IRETI – “Empowering women and strengthening socioeconomic integration”. Many hours have been spent together planning, implementing and finalizing this project. After two years of collaboration between the associations HRYO (Italy), AUR (Romania), Ubele (The UK) and BB&R (Spain),we were ready to present the results and discuss the findings with local entities in Salamanca. We give a big thanks to all the entities that let us come and share the project and the IRETI results!That includes the USAL Radio, the Salamanca City Council, Entreculturas Salamanca and the Europe direct Salamanca.
IRETI has been mentioned many times in HRYO’s social media, but I will again mention the main topic of the project as I find it incredibly important to raise awareness on. The word itself means “hope” in Yoruba (Nigerian language), and with the increasing number of Nigerian women being trafficked to Europe over the recent years there is a need to help these women from violence and exploitation,to empower them andregain their deprived freedom. Working towards reducing, and eliminating, the extent of human trafficking is not a taskwhere I see an end, everyday new people are being trapped and tricked into this life.
Our first activity of these days took place at the Radio station of Salamanca University, where we spent some time discussing the project process, our thoughts on the execution, and our reflections of the impact it has had on the participants of the mobilities. Overall the IRETI project activities have aimed to bring together representatives, professionals and people with experience working with victims of human trafficking, or individuals who survived human trafficking. Through different blended mobilities we have had the opportunity to discuss, share and exchange experiences, practices and information from the different participants that have created intercultural bonds and relationships. And as one of the participants from these mobilities, I can just say that I plan to keep in touch with the people I have met from these meetings.
During the final meeting we also held a presentation at the University library of Salamanca, where we presented the results of the project, which includes the IRETI booklet, toolkit and website. The information and feedback that has been given during the blended mobilities and two months internships, have been the base knowledge for the creation and development of these.
- The IRETI booklet is a gathering of Good Practices from each of the partner countries. In the booklet you can find 4-5 description of local associations who, in some way, work with women and empowerment, and the description of services they offer.
- The toolkit includes identified aspects when it comes to communication and working with victims of human trafficking, that can be important for professionals to consider when approaching women in vulnerable situations.
- At last there is the IRETI website (https://ireti.org/) that is created to be useful for people who seek help or in general want more information on the subject of human trafficking. There are also some emergency contact information, especially connected to the partner countries and the cities (Palermo, Bucharest, London and Salamanca).
We hope that professionals and others who are involved with work connected to identifying and empowering victims of human trafficking and domestic violence can use these elements as sources of inspiration and information to increase the quality of work, to help most people in the best way. The IRETI project has in addition to these results connected a lot of people with the same passion, and the same motivation to fight against the global issue of human trafficking. The way to fight against a global issue is to collaborate on a global level.