Women in Business: Negotiation, a Tool for Self-Advocacy

Women in Business is a series designed and led by women to share their knowledge about valuable and necessary business skills needed to drive growth at your company. Whether you are a startup or an SME, this series will introduce you to professional and highly skilled women. Each session will cover a specific topic and will provide valuable expertise to people who are looking to improve their skills to increase their employability or to develop or start their own businesses.


Women in Business: Negotiation, a Tool for Self-Advocacy

At some point or another, whether you are running your own business or are part of a business as an employee, you are going to have to negotiate. Indeed, negotiation is at the core of business strategy and relationship building. Whether attracting clients, establishing partnerships, growing your customer base, asking for promotion or a salary increase, skills in negotiation will be essential for personal and business growth. Furthermore, even if you are not an entrepreneur, knowledge about negotiation is a valuable life skill for everyday self-advocacy.

This session will be led by Venera Kusari, Conflict Assessment Specialist, and will focus on how women can overcome challenges concerning their motivation, confidence, and the expectations of others. By enhancing their understanding of negotiations and gaining negotiation skills, women will increase their ability to advocate for themselves and everyone involved through creative solutions.

The sessions will explore the following topics:

  • Gender roles and negotiation
  • Culture and power dynamics
  • Emotions and communication
  • Planning and preparation for negotiation

This will be a hybrid event– online and in-person tickets available.


Cost: NOK100

You can register HERE.

Maximum in-person attendees: 20

We are monitoring and following the current COVID restrictions. If necessary we will hold this event entirely online. 


Venera Kusari is a Conflict Assessment Specialist with over ten years of experience in program development and management, research, and training. She has supervised international projects on minority rights, youth and urban violence, crisis response, and intercommunal conflict, in former Yugoslavia, Colombia, Myanmar, and the United States. She received an undergraduate degree in Political Science and Sociology from the City University of New York and a graduate degree in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution from Columbia University in New York. As a researcher Venera researches complex dynamics in conflict, communication and conflict, power asymmetries, sustainable peace, mediation, and negotiation. As a trainer, she leads workshops with youth, women, and communities in conflict. Among the organizations where Venera has worked are Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4) at Columbia University, Smile Education and Development Foundation in Myanmar, and Mercy Corps International in Kosovo. Venera is dedicated and passionate about influencing positive change through personal and social development. She believes that social change starts by creating spaces that promote constructive communication practices within organized units such as workplaces, families, communities, and political institutions.

Chisom Udeze

Founder of Diversify, Diversify Consult, HerSpace & The Annual

Chisom is an Economist, a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) Strategist, and a 3 times founder of impact driven companies. She has over 14 years of experience working with organizations like the European Commission, The United Nations, ExxonMobil and The Economist Group. Chisom is analytical and a data enthusiast. She is passionate about interrogating the cross-sectoral relationship between society’s inhabitants, resources, production, technology, distribution and output. She efficiently and effectively unlocks complex systems, interprets data, forecasts socio-economic trends and conducts research.

Having lived and worked in 7 countries across 3 continents, she is highly adaptable to different circumstances and people, and thrives in uncertain environments.

As the founder of Diversify and Diversify Consult, Chisom and her team work with companies, institutions, governments and civil society to develop sustainable DEIB strategies and embed measurable diversity and inclusion initiatives in the workplace and society. In addition, in 2022, Diversify launched the Diversify Nordics Summit, the largest conference in the Nordics that gathers cross-sectoral stakeholders to amplify DEIB in the Nordics and beyond.

In 2020, she founded HerSpace, a diverse and inclusive co-creation community for all genders, with particular focus on women and non-binary people. In 2022, HerSpace launched HerTech, Women in Tech incubator, for women-led companies, with a focus on the inclusion of diverse founders. 

Chisom is a thought-leader in DEIB and a passionate advocate for mental health and wellness. She writes often on DEIB and justice related topics, some of her work is published on Forbes.

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