Press conference by women’s NGOs

 

There was no such thing as “women’s issues” as every issue of significant concern to the world was intimately related to women’s ability to achieve gender equality and gender equity, Kavita Ramdas, President, Global Fund for Women, told correspondents today during a Headquarters press conference.  Wu Qing, Director, Cultural Development Centre for Rural Women, China, also participated.

The press conference, moderated by Paul Hoeffel, Chief, NGO Section, Department of Public Information (DPI), took place on the occasion of the annual NGO Conference, which this year has the theme “Millennium Development Goals:  Civil Society Takes Action”.  Some 1,700 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from 90 countries are participating.

Ms. Ramdas said that only through women’s experience and their ability to be “change-makers” in their communities could one hope to see real achievements in implementing the Millennium Development Goals and many of the “lofty goals” set at other important conferences.  One of the major concerns of women’s organizations was that the Goals, because of the way gender equality was articulated in the third Goal, were not a sufficient way to address the many needs of gender equity and gender equality.

Women’s organizations were not only concerned with the third Goal, which pertained to gender equality, because it made no mention of such critical issues as violence against women and women’s role in all aspects of their society and decision making, she said.  They were similarly concerned about the absolute lack of accountability for governments from the northern hemisphere regarding the eighth Goal [develop a global partnership for development].  Without a commitment and without holding the governments in the developed world accountable to Goal eight, the other goals would not be achieved.

Many women’s organizations, working at the grass-roots level, were hoping to encourage the United Nations to bring together “Beijing+10” [an evaluation of achievements made in implementing the 1995 Beijing Platform of Action ten years after its adoption] with “MDG+5” [an evaluation of implementation of the Millennium Development Goals five years of their adoption] when, early in 2005, women’s organizations from all over the world would gather in New York to discuss the status of women.

She said The Global Fund for Women was a 17-year old, independent grant-making foundation based in San Francisco, California, governed by a Board of Directors made up primarily of activists.  The Fund was currently the largest grant-making foundation exclusively focusing on women’s human rights internationally, and supported local women’s organizations in 160 countries.

Wu Qing, Director, Cultural Development Centre for Rural Women, China, said her group had been growing since the Beijing Conference.  Her group had tried to eliminate poverty through empowerment projects.  Women were being told that they were human beings, before they were women, so that they would not be constrained by stereotyped gender roles.  The Centre encouraged women to send in proposals and supported the 10 best proposals.  Many women had, in this way, become self-reliant by starting their own projects. 

Ms. Wu said the Centre had also started literacy projects, particularly in remote places in China, by training teachers.  It even mobilized children to teach their mothers.  Workshops had been started regarding violence against women in order to make them aware of the fact that women’s rights were human rights.  The Centre did not want to have projects specifically for women, but wanted women and men to work together as partners in projects, starting from feasibility studies, through implementation of projects, to evaluation.  All projects, to be sustainable, should have both men and women involved.

Asked about the future of NGOs in Iraq after two Italian women working for NGOs had been kidnapped, Ms. Ramdas said the Global Fund for Women had supported NGOs working in the north of Iraq, particularly in Kurdistan, that “courageously” addressed issues such as honour killings, forced marriages and girls’ access to education.  It was extremely unfortunate that one powerful country could make an independent decision to go into another country under the guise of so called humanitarian or security concerns.  When that happened without international backing, it produced an unstable environment.  Women were more or less vulnerable to insecurity than others, but they knew first-hand that the prevailing and traditionally male response to conflict, namely more conflict, had not worked.

Noting that 70 per cent of women who had survived the Rwanda genocide had been raped, she said, “Women’s bodies are the first place where war gets played out.”  Women were tired of being “the prize of war”.  It was time for women to demand a role and presence in peacekeeping.  The Security Council resolution 1325, adopted in 2000, had yet to be implemented.  It was time for women to hold all nations -- not just small, powerless ones -- accountable for the laws supposed to govern all.  The United Nations could not have hope to have legitimacy in the poorest countries of the world when a few large nations had one set of rules and poorer countries, with no resources, were subject to another set of rules.

Ms. Wu said all lives were precious -- those of men, women and children.  It was, therefore, very important for women to participate in all negotiations, because women were the ones who really cared about human lives.  Every country, regardless of its size, had to respect the same rules, namely the United Nations Human Rights Charter.

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