Grassroots women speak out at the CSW
By Rachel Gordon
There were far too many parallel events at the UN Commission on the Status of Women’s annual meeting in New York over the past two weeks to even contemplate attending them all. I was able to represent GDN at several events toward the end of the CSW, however, and hear from inspiring women about the incredible and incredibly challenging work happening at the grassroots. We all know it’s happening. Like a number of other GDN members, though, I spend most of my time sitting in front of a computer. I am very far removed from the plains of Bahia, Brazil or the slums of Manila, from where several of the speakers traveled to take part in the activities.
The Huairou Commission sponsored a Grassroots Women’s Speakout to UN Women on Wednesday, March 2, where a number of their members and grantees stood up to tell Michelle Bachelet, former president of Chile and new Under-Secretary General and head of UN Women, about their work and their recommendations for the new agency. Women spoke of their communities in Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Nigeria, Uganda, Peru, Rwanda and the Congo, Brazil and Cameroon.
Haydee Rodriguez, a producer from Nicaragua and president of the Las Brumas Cooperative, came to represent 20 Nicaraguan women’s cooperatives with 1200 members. She spoke first and suggested that UN Women should hold a preparatory meeting with grassroots women’s groups prior to the next CSW. Her recommendation was echoed and supported by many of the subsequent speakers in the meeting, and picked up by Ms. Bachelet herself in her closing remarks before she left the meeting (early, with another UN Women representative staying in her place).
Several main threads ran through the speaker’s comments. Most revolved around the importance of the work that women’s organizations are doing at the grassroots and the necessity of UN Women having real engagement with that work if it is to have any hope of succeeding at the mission with which it has been charged, which is to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women, including-if not especially-the world’s poorest and most marginalized women.
Speakers’ other recommendations included a grassroots advisory board to UN Women, a fund to support women community leaders to travel to important gatherings and make their voices heard, and the official adoption of a vision of food security rooted in the needs of small- and medium-scale producers, particularly women farmers, and the long-term environmental sustainability of agricultural land. For the most part, the speakers simply urged Ms. Bachelet to pay attention to what is happening far away from the halls of power, and to support them in their work.
And she listened. She assured them that they need not worry about how to convince her of the importance of their recommendations; she came into the room convinced, and was there instead to hear their comments and transmit them to rest of the UN, where concern for poor women so often fails to translate, as we know, into real action to support them, much less respect for them as agents of change rather than subjects of pity and aid.
She also spoke of the tension that UN Women must navigate in almost every aspect of its young existence: between needing to have an accessible presence on the ground and not building another UN bureaucracy; between validating the money already dedicated to its work and securing the additional funding necessary for doing the work well; and between leading the fight for gender equality and women’s empowerment without allowing other UN agencies to abdicate their similar responsibilities for gender analysis and mainstreaming.
Other events in my brief visit to the CSW included a Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) panel on “Learning from Local Initiatives: Women’s Low-Carbon Innovations Inform Policy” and a Women of Color United discussion of “Southern Synergies: South-North Collaborations on the MDGs,” as well as a panel on “Social Change: Women, Networks and Technology.” These events highlighted the same significant North-South power imbalances brought up in the morning’s Huairou event. An audience member from the Philippines commented to the WEDO panel on the need for women to be taken seriously, proclaiming that “we don’t want microcredit; we want credit! We want access to real banks and real funding that will support the important work we are doing in our communities!” I wished for nothing more than another Speakout, this time not to Michelle Bachelet, but to the presidents of HSBC and Deutsche Bank.
Throughout my stay in New York I heard quite a bit of discussion about gender equality, and rightly so: it is at the core of the mission of UN Women and one of the major goals of many women’s organizations at both the grassroots and the highest levels of officialdom. I can’t help but wonder, however, if a focus on equality without critical examination of the social, economic and political structures within which women and men live out their gender roles isn’t an argument for a larger piece of a poisoned pie. Like Nereide Segala Coelho, the leader of the Adapta Sertao Network in Brazil and a member of Huairou Commission who spoke out to Michelle Bachelet about the need for definitions of food security rooted in long-term environmental sustainability rather than short term agricultural yield, I believe the bigger picture must change.
Of course, the need for equal rights and access for women is critical. At the same time, we must fight not only for more power, but for a different framework in which to exercise that power. Equality is one thing, but equity and justice are equally key concepts. The women who traveled from all over the world to the CSW are fighting for all of these goals. Hopefully, last week’s events allowed everyone not only to forge new connections and networks for their efforts, but to convince the UN that the real agents of change are at least as likely to be found in the fields and community centers of Peru and Papua New Guinea as in the office buildings of New York and Geneva.
Tags: Adapta Sertao, CSW, grassroots, Huairou Commission, Las Brumas Cooperative, Michele Bachelet, Nicaragua, UN, WEDO