1.- Women from all around the world mobilized for the right to education.

The Gender and Education Office of ICAE held an international seminar from June 26-28, 2008, in Montevideo, on “Women in motion for the right to education”.

By Marcela Hernandez
ICAE

Around 40 women from 19 different countries, from all regions, participated in this three-day seminar: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Lebanon, Mexico, Moldova, Philippines, Senegal, Spain, Tanzania, UK, Uruguay and Zambia. The idea was to provide a space to reflect on the world political context and the different advocacy spaces in the struggle for women's rights and further reflect on GEO's work so as to be able to come up with strategies towards CONFINTEA VI and an action plan for the coming two years.

The opening ceremony had the presence of the Ministry of Education and Culture of Uruguay, Maria Simon, whose speech is summarized below, and also the participation of the Director of the Women’s Institute of the Ministry of Social Development, Carmen Beramendi, and Celita Eccher, ICAE Secretary General.

Afterwards, a round table on advocacy spaces took place, where three panelists gave their views from different perspectives. Patricia Jaramillo, from Colombia focused on the World Trade Organization and the International Financial Institutions while Cecilia Fernandez, from ICAE, made some reflections on World Social Forum, the debate whether it is a space or a movement and how to measure its results and effectiveness. Then, Gita Sen, a feminist activist and scholar from India, founding member of DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New ERA) gave a presentation that focused on 3 aspects: first, she made a general view on what advocacy means, as GEO’s meeting was about how to get prepared for advocacy as we move forward towards CONFINTEA VI; secondly, she referred to some lessons learnt from DAWN’s experience with advocacy over almost 25 years, and, third, she made some comments on the current political context as a way of framing where we are in terms of spaces for advocacy and the possibilities and challenges faced at this point. Within this context she mentioned and remarked the example of the Human Rights Council as a key space for advocacy.

The following days were devoted to strategizing, planning and getting prepared towards CONFINTEA VI and in this sense, different task forces were created to ensure gender mainstreaming at the different regional conferences as well as in the strategic documents.



2.- Welcome message for GEO meeting from Paul Bélanger

The GEO international seminar ‘Women in motion for the right to education’ is arriving at a very critical moment, a moment where we have to reflect on strategies of civil society organizations in the changing world political context.
A central objective of this international meeting of feminist movements conveyed by GEO is to review advocacy strategies in the struggle for women’s rights. It is particularly in that context, that this Seminar, opening today, is critical for the whole of ICAE’s networks. We are all worried about the uncertainties of the UN space that civil society organizations have enjoyed and used in the recent past, a space we used to defend and promote human rights in general and particularly gender equality and gender identity.
Civil society organizations need the analysis of feminist movements, an analysis which has been a critical reference during the various summits of the nineties. Your analysis will be crucial. Your evaluation of the set back or limited results of the various post five and post ten meetings is much needed together with your assessment of the new spaces constructed like the World Social Forum or of the emerging actions to reform UN. It will be crucial for the defense of women’s rights which are been denied publicly as well as in the silence of privacy, but it is also much required to rethink past strategies of international civil society and the space that we need to have or to create for efficient collective action.
The intellectual and strategic contribution of GEO internationally and, in Latin America, of REPEM in the ongoing renewal of ICAE is a very concrete example of what I wanted to express at the beginning of our seminar
In solidarity,
Paul Bélanger
President of ICAE
 

3.- Education, the only guarantee for human rights, remarked Minister Maria Simon

PRESS RELEASE
Montevideo, 27th. June 2008
 

“Women in Motion for the Right to Education”
Montevideo, June 26-28, 2008


Last Thursday, during the opening ceremony of the international seminar “Women in Motion for the Right to Education”, organized by the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE), the Minister of Education and Culture, Maria Simón, said that the only way of ensuring human rights is providing lifelong learning, not only in formal spheres but also throughout the whole education system.

“Education centers are social centers and, in fact, our proposal of a General Education Act considers them as very important elements where not only students and learners but also parents and social points of reference can get together and transform this society into a lifelong learning society”, said Simón, on Thursday during the opening ceremony of the seminar, held at the Conference Room of the Ministry of Transport, where she shared the space with Celita Eccher, ICAE Secretary General and Carmen Beramendi, Director of the National Women’s Institute of the Ministry of Social Development.

More than 50 women from all over the world attentively listened to the words of the Minister and agreed with her vision. The seminar, which started on Thursday and ended on Saturday, has been an opportunity for women, all around the world, who work for youth and adult education from a gender perspective, to gather, reflect and elaborate strategies for GEO’s participation in the Sixth International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VI) in Brazil, in May 2009.

“In those countries where we have suffered State terrorism, education is the only guarantee. The role of States either in public or private education consists in guaranteeing the access to education for all and lifelong learning”.

This is an important issue, added Maria Simón, not only in developing countries but also in developed countries and the reason is simple, we live longer, we have better life quality and people wish to receive education because they were not able to do so during their youth or because they want to take the opportunity through other kind of non formal education.

Referring again to the Education Act which is presently under discussion, the State Secretary emphasized that it will be the first norm that will cover all the population, even those who are more vulnerable, such as prisoners and will focus on the learner. She added that “it is crosscut by several important lines but human rights and peace are principles that rule all forms of education”.

“All societies have several forms of exclusion, but I will give a local example: in our country the University has a majority of female attendance, however, in those careers related to exact sciences women are only a minority, just a fourth. We must be doing something wrong and we do not know what it is. But we are evidently stimulating some kind of capacity in girls and a different one in boys, and our countries are not in a position of wasting talent”, stated Maria Simon.

Confintea VI

ICAE Secretary General, Celita Eccher, highlighted the ongoing work for CONFINTEA VI and the importance of its preparatory process. CONFINTEA is an international conference, convened by UNESCO every 12 years to discuss on adult education, next CONFINTEA will take place next year in Brazil.

In this sense, Eccher admitted that the commitments made by the countries that participated in last CONFINTEA V in Hamburg, in 1997, regarding environment, literacy, citizenship and gender issues, have not been accomplished.

“We have to review our strategies and work on the proposals we want to present to our governments regarding the accomplishment of the right to education for all adults”, she said.

ICAE is a global network, created in 1973, formed by non governmental organizations, regional and national networks in more than 75 countries, recognized by UNESCO as an international NGO, with consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. It is a strategic network that promotes learning as a tool for active and informed participation of people.

By Rosana Gómez
 

4.- Advocacy spaces for the women's movement: A speech by Gita Sen

Speech delivered by Dr. Gita Sen* within the framework of the international seminar "Women in motion for the right to education" that took place in June 2008 in Montevideo, Uruguay. The seminar was organized by the Gender and Education Office (GEO) of the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) and counted with the participation of women leaders from around the world.

* Feminist activist and scholar, she is a founding member of DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era).

26 June 2008. Montevideo, Uruguay.

Friends,

ICAE gave me a very large mandate, and many things to say about advocacy, so I tried to pick on only certain things that I feel are crucial. Because of that, there are many things that I won’t be able to speak about. Among these, I will certainly not speak about the World social Forum or about trade and finance except to say one or two things, since both topics have been covered by the previous speakers.
ICAE wanted me to speak quite a bit about advocacy, which in a sense is what this meeting is about: a preparation for advocacy as you move forward towards the next CONFINTEA and other sites.
I am going to be speaking about five different things. First, just a very general definition of advocacy as I use the term in the rest of the talk. Secondly, (based on that) some lessons from DAWN’s experience with advocacy over now almost 25 years. Third, some discussion about the current political contexts, and I’ll do that very quickly as a way of framing where we are in terms of spaces for advocacy and what we can do; what are the possibilities, and what are the challenges that we face at this point.
And in that context I am going to use a new example which is the example of the Human Rights Council(HRC) because very few women’s groups participate in the work of the HRC. I hope this will be new to many people and therefore interesting and not simply repeating the things you know.
And finally I will conclude with some critical questions and reflections on what should be our stance as feminist advocates. Where do we place ourselves, where do we stand in order to do this work as best we can?

What is Advocacy?
First, therefore, just a simple question about advocacy itself. Many people ask me – and I am serious about this - how do I keep smiling? Because, by the time you end up looking at the world as it is, you certainly don’t feel like smiling. My question to anyone that says “how can you keep on doing this? year, after year, after year” is that I don’t see that I have a choice, and I don’t feel that as feminists we have a choice not to do it. Things would be much worse if we didn’t do it, which is of course why
we do it! And since we are going to do it we may as well smile while we are doing it. It would be more difficult otherwise!

The other point which is more importantis to realize that, however much we may think that the world is in horrible shape – the militarization, the globalization, the economic changes leading to growing inequality and poverty, the complexities in getting any forward movement on women’s human rights - it’s very helpful to understand that the other side is in complete crisis as well.
They are in crisis, they are messed up and they are completely freaked out! And it helps for us to remember that, because we think we are in crisis, we are messed up and we are freaking out. Surely, if you look at what the other side is saying, - and the other side could be different people and positions depending on the issue - they are even more (or at least as and often more) freaked out than we are. If that is the case, then we must be doing something right! And so although things look horrible, and gray, and grim and so on, I think that in order for us to feel that we can move forward it’s very helpful to keep looking at how the other side is thinking, reflecting and what it is saying at the present
time.

So, what is advocacy? In the last decade or so, the simple word advocacy has gotten hugely mystified. And one of the reasons it has gotten mystified is because funders have gotten in the business of funding advocacy. And the minute funders get into anything, things can start getting mystified, and complicated because people often start adjusting their concepts accordingly. And the logic of funding, as we know, has other things involved in it: indicators, mechanisms, specifications of log frames etc. Ideas that were simple can start becoming much more difficult for us to understand or even to know what we are doing!
In my basic and very simple understanding of advocacy, it is simply the art of friendly persuasion. You are just persuading people, and I use the world “friendly” because if it’s not friendly, it’s not advocacy, it is combat, it is war.
You may disagree, but you have to get the person who you are trying to persuade to feel that it is worthwhile to move in a certain direction. Now if you read the ICAE report that Denise spoke about earlier, there’s a very interesting piece by Gina Vargas in it in which she asks whether we should be speaking about advocacy or about counterpower?”
I believe that we are speaking about both things, it’s not an either/or. And in the world that we live in, counterpower by itself is not enough. Persuasion is necessary as well because we have to get people to come onto our side. And this is what the art and the politics of advocacy is all about.

Lessons from DAWN’s experience

In DAWN’s experience with advocacy over close to 25 years – mostly at the global level but also at the national and regional levels. - we’ve learned some critical things which I hope we can come back to in our discussion.

a. Being prepared
To be a good advocate, homework is necessary, is absolutely critical. The importance of preparation cannot be stressed too much. You cannot do advocacy unless you are prepared.
And given that most of us as feminists are in a position of subordinate power where we are actually trying to counter dominant discourse, dominant practices and so on, unless we are well prepared, nobody listens to us, nobody even cares. And that’s simply hard and sometimes boring work but it means that it does require that somebody has to be sitting and doing this work ahead of time. Thorough preparation is absolutely essential for our credibility.

b. Credibility
Credibility is the most fundamental requirement to be a good advocate. That is, people believe you when you say something. That actually takes time to build up. In the beginning, people will not believe you. They will not want to believe you, because you’re saying things that are counter to the dominant discourse, very often, to the dominant power relationships and so on.
So the importance of credibility is that over time, as you are seen to be someone who speaks based on reality, who speaks based on facts, credibility builds up and that’s the most important asset that an advocate can have. I would say it is THE absolutely most important thing to have with you, with us, as we go forward as advocates. And I think many of us in all the different spaces where we are engaged, know that.
We also know how much damage a false step can do to credibility. And that means that to nurture credibility, one has to be able to say when you don’t know, not pretend that we know when we don’t know because that is very easy to find out and then people say “don’t listen to her, she just talks through her hat, she doesn’t really know what she is talking about”.
 

c. Admit mistakes
It is very important, if a mistake is made, to immediately acknowledge it, to say “ I made a mistake, sorry!”. People are willing to forgive mistakes, everyone makes mistakes. As Sonia Correa said in the REPEM meeting: the right to make mistakes is a very important human right!
But the problem is when we don’t acknowledge the mistake. We make the mistake and we cover it up. In situations of advocacy, our mistakes can have huge impact on others. So it’s not just ourselves but a whole lot of other people that get affected by our mistakes, so if we don’t recognize them, acknowledge them and say “oops, let’s step back, figure out what we did here” we can make a mess not just for ourselves, but for a lot of other people.

d. Responsibility
The other contribution to credibility is a sense of responsibility which comes from the fact that in fact we are responsible. We do what we do as public citizens and for a reason. Not because we are privately paid to do this work in civil society. Although, of course as we know, people get paid,
they have jobs and so on. But making money is not our primary motivation. But it’s very important to have that sense of responsibility, to be sure that in fact, you don’t go into advocacy lightly.
This is very important because I’ve been in many situations where people – women and I suppose men too - come to the advocacy environment, a meeting a context, and then go out, literally, go out shopping. And whether the work is done or not done, when everybody shows up, there is nobody to particularly point and say, “Where were you? Now we are not ready, what happened?”
Because there is no collective responsibility, there is only individual responsibility. But that is crucial because if we don’t exercise that individual responsibility, we can take the easy way out, because there is nobody to ask us “what did you do? Where were you? What happened to you at the critical moment, at 12:30 at night when the governments where absolutely deciding on something and we needed this information? You had it, you were not there, you were nowhere to be found” Nobody really asks these questions. We all know how polite we are to each other. Sometimes, if it’s really bad, people will yell and scream at each other but in the end it’s a sense of responsibility that has to come
from within ourselves, from within our organizations. Yet, it is an absolute requirement as well
for credibility. If you are known to be irresponsible, people will say “that person says she will do something; don’t believe it will get done”. And that’s, again, for an advocate, a real problem.

e. Being flexible
The other aspect of advocacy which I love to speak about is the importance of flexibility, because the art of friendly persuasion is exactly this. You cannot be like that pillar: immovable: “I have this position, I will not move” Well, you have to be able to move, and it is what in DAWN we now call the “Zen” of advocacy, based on the old Zen principle, “Bend, and you shall not break”.
We have to know as advocates when to make a compromise, because as we all know, advocacy is also about making compromises. We have to come to an agreement. You push as hard as you can and then, ok. But when we do that, of course, the real art of Zen is not letting the other side know what your bottom line is. Because if they know how far they can push you, then they will push you there immediately. You have to always pretend “oh, no, we are never going to agree to go below this level” But maybe your actual bottom line may be somewhere here [signal of below that] that you will not give up on. The business of being able to be flexible is also a very important thing because we are
really, as feminist advocates, in this for the long haul. I do not expect in my lifetime, to see the
kind of feminist utopian world that we would all love to see, I am sure about that. Some of you
might, but I don’t expect that I will!
We are in this for the long haul; we are talking about a transformation that is so massive that it will take time. We also have to live to fight another day, we have to be alive in order to be able to fight tomorrow and the art of being flexible is also so that we can say, “ok, let us back off a bit at this point so that we come back again” You don’t give up but you don’t also fight to the point that you are destroyed at every moment, and then you are so done for that you can’t do anything more beyond that. Again, I think that good advocates at whatever level know this quite well in their work: when to retreat, when to step backwards a little bit.
A more militaristic analogy than Zen is guerrilla warfare: take two steps forward, one step back, you move this side, if you can’t do here, you go there, you go around, you do whatever needs to be done. The art of advocacy is really to be making and creating constantly those channels through which and from which one can in fact figure out the spaces for moving forward.

f. Integrity and basic principles
There are a couple of other issues which I hope to speak of at the end, which is something that we’ve learned at DAWN - the importance of integrity and basic principles. And I am saying that right after talking about flexibility because we cannot be flexible to the point where we have no basic principles left whatsoever; where we just do anything. Knowing what those principles are and having the integrity to maintain them, and I will speak about this a little bit later, is extremely important.

g. Building alliances
And another issue that is extremely important is the importance of alliances. Advocacy is not something that we can do by ourselves as feminists; at least not in this world as yet. We don’t have enough power as the feminist movement to be able to make the changes that we want without
alliances. We should, because as women we know what proportion of the human race we are!
But as feminists we are a much, much smaller group. And so building effective alliances is essential.

These are just some general principles that have come from DAWN’s advocacy practice over the years.

Political and economic context
I now want to address the current political economic context and what kind of space it is opening or closing for us as feminist advocates.
Because of lack of time I am not going to speak too much about national and regional contexts. I am going to speak more about global spaces, although what happens at the global level has implications at the other levels.
However we need to recognize that what is happening at the national and regional level and what is going on the global level need not always be synchronised.
You can have much better (or worse) spaces at national or regional than at the global level. So just
because the global looks one way, doesn’t mean that therefore it’s the same in the others.
But this absence of synchronicity or synchronization does not mean that there are no links. There are always linkages and those linkages are what we have to try and understand and act on while always recognizing the differences that may exist in our different contexts.
A participant from Lebanon already asked this question: “What do we do in contexts where the situation for women is very different, were it doesn’t look like Uruguay, it looks like something
else?” It is clear this is a very important question. I hope we can come back to this in the discussion.

Let us look however at broad commonalities. I am not going to speak about what we all know are the
challenges of the global political environment and economy in terms of globalization, the inequality, the transformations taking place in the economy and politics, the difficulties in the political situations, militarization, the risks and dangers caused by the decline of American hegemony. Falling imperial power is always dangerous, and that is why we are now in a very dangerous international situation.

Challenges for the feminist movement
a. Tension between economic justice and gender justice
From the perspective of women’s rightsas human rights, one of the most central challenges that we face at the global level at this point is something that in DAWN we identified some time ago as the tension between economic justice on the one side and gender justice on the other. By gender justice I don’t mean that there is no economic justice as part of gender justice, but I am referring here to all of those aspects of women’s human rights that are outside the economic sphere such as sexual and reproductive health and rights, violence against women, anti-women cultural values, norms and practices. (In DAWN we use this simply for ease of description and understanding).

The recognition of this tension for us came from our practice of advocacy. As we went to the conferences of the 90’s as advocates, this tension was very evident. As DAWN is a Southern network we were sitting right in the middle of this dilemma. On the one hand you had all of the North, (the European, the North Americans (pre Bush), the Australians, and so on) all pushing in conference
after conference of the 1990’s, for women’s rights, gender equality, and so on. Whether it was the Human Rights Conference in Vienna in 1993, through Cairo, through Copenhagen, through Beijing, through Habitat, through all of them, (and the US was part of this until the neocons, until the Bush administration came in,) THEY were the strongest, most vocal and articulate supporters for
women’s rights and equality.
But they were very intransigent when it came to economic justice issues. You would get perennially the stand off between the G77 on the one side, arguing the right to development, the right to a level playing field in trade , the right to adequate financial provisions, effective reforms of the financial system , the importance of ensuring food, removing poverty, inequality…All of these issues would be raised by the South.
And often, what we started finding is that the women’s rights agenda would fall between these two. It would be exactly the point at which the two sides would be struggling. Because the G77 would take hard-line positions on women’s rights and gender equality (although there are plenty of countries within the G77 including in Latin America that are very progressive on women’s rights but they would
speak for a long time under the umbrella of the G77), simply because there could find no other
space to effectively confront the North except on the issue of gender equality and justice. And this became a huge challenge and a tension that has existed for many years.

Now of course this challenge has evolved over time.
And some of the countries of the South - in the process of the evolution of the conferences and their review conferences - evolved mechanisms to start breaking up this very hard tension. Particularly countries of Latin America starting breaking off and saying to others in G77, “no, no, we won’t go with you when it comes to reproductive rights, we have a different position”. The G77 began more and more to speak as one on the economic issues but as individual countries or as other groupings on gender equality and women’s rights.
Although this started happening, every time there was an intergovernmental negotiation, there was always the risk that it would go back to the same hard tension. On the other side, the problem was that, although the G77 was no longer such a solid block on the gender equality issues, there was no corresponding softening on the other side. There was nobody on the Northern side that broke up the Northern hard-line on issues like the right to development, aid, how aid is structured, financial issues, trade issues…The North remained and has continued as a solid bloc(k) against global economic justice, and this has posed for us Southern feminists a huge and continuing problem.
If anything, the North has gotten even more consolidated. Whether it takes the form of the Paris Agenda on aid, the positions that they are taking in the Financing for Development review or any of the other economic issues, they are far more consolidated now than they have been in the past . This is a kind of asymmetry that has happened in the evolution of this tension which I think affects our advocacy space quite seriously.

b. Tensions with development NGOs
Now, how do development NGOs view gender? Although this has slowly improved over time, the amount of progress we are making there is still at a snail’s pace. To get development NGOs in general to start taking gender seriously has been a very hard process - and this is true for even the most progressive NGOs, in the traditional sense. Many tend to be not progressive at all when it comes to taking gender seriously.
And this is an important tension because we, as women feminists, tend to be progressive on the broad development issues but many male development workers and organizations do not reciprocate. They don’t include us, meaning they don’t include our issues, and they don’t ensure their organizations are fair or equal in gender terms, and we have - to fight the same fight over and over again.

c. Tensions within women’s NGOs
A third tension is within women’s NGOs. There is a problem, because many feminists tend to run away from the larger development issues, from economic issues, because they can be boring and confusing and also very technical.
As a movement we cannot afford to do this any more, or else we end up talking about poverty without knowing what is really going on. We end up not talking at all about finance when it’s probably one of THE most central issues in the world today, especially given the nature of the financial crisis.
And as the women’s movement, if we pick up some issues and not the others, we then don’t have a movement that has a possibility of moving across these spaces in a credible manner.

Advocacy spaces open at the global level

a. Economic issues – trade and finance
When we speak about many different spaces for advocacy, the first is on broadly the economic issues, specifically on trade, finance, and aid. Unfortunately,other than on the International Gender and Trade
Network (IGTN), there are very few feminists working on that area.
While the WTO’s Doha agenda is not moving forward, there has been a great deal of liberalization already done and secondly, the way forward that Northern countries are using now is bilateral treaties. And these are almost, without exception, much harder in the terms that they give to developing countries than the WTO itself.
Another aspect of the global financial context is that while the institutions are in a big crisis there is not yet anything that involves adequate global regulation of the global financial system which is what is desperately needed to avoid financial crisis all over again. And there is mounting evidence that the current global commodities crisis – oil, food, etc – are closely linked to speculation and the roliferation of unregulated financial markets.

b. Discussions on aid
Aid is another issue that for us feminists is very important and raises a number of Questions - specifically in relation to the Paris agenda for aid effectiveness, and the question of “positive conditionalities”. In the Paris declaration on aid effectiveness, as most people know, gender, human rights and the environment were called “crosscutting issues” but there was only one mention in the entire document and no mechanisms to actually make them into crosscutting issues of any kind.
Some women’s organizations have been working on how to improve the visibility of gender in the aid effectiveness discussions.
In DAWN we’ve taken a certain position on one issue that comes up in this context: It’s ok to raise the visibility of gender but we are absolutely against the idea of “positive conditionality” under whatever name.
We do not want aid assistance to be made conditional in the name of gender equality. If we go that route, we will undermine everything that we were able to do within our own contexts and situations. So our position, that we’ve been trying to introduce into the feminist agenda, is that if there are things to be done for women’s rights and gender equality in our national and regional contexts, then we will do them, and we will be glad to get appropriate support. But donors and funders cannot make gender equality happen through aid conditionality.
If, within countries, the feminist movement is not able to push forward the gender equality, what is donor conditionality going to do? It will only convert it into another meaningless checklist at the back of aid documents.

c. The Human Rights Council
Another area that has become important as a space for advocacy is broadly on the women’s rights/ human rights area and this is of course where social development, education, CONFINTEA, all of that work becomes absolutely crucial. We have to keep pushing on this side.
Animportant arena for this is now the Human Rights Council. The HRC was established in 2006 in Geneva and it was the phoenix that came out of the ashes of the Commission on Human Rights. The US which was one of the biggest critics of the HR Commission refused to be part of the new Council Because the HR Council had a large general support from a larger North-South agreement it got a General Assembly resolution stating that all countries had to go through a process called “Universal Periodic Review”. Three times a year they meet and review country reports, 16 each time.
As part of the UPR, they also receive reports form NGOs, civil society that will also be considered in the process of the review of the country. Now, this is a huge opening because this is currently the most open UN space for NGOs. New York has become very closed, but at the HRC in Geneva you can participate in the discussion, etc.
Secondly, it is the very first time that under a single umbrella we have the economic issues as well as gender, sexuality and so on all together. LGBT groups are absolutely together and very active in the HRC work but the unfortunate thing is that there are very few women’s groups, hardly any at all. And this is a space were we could link from national to global level a process that allows us to integrate economic and gender issues in very interesting ways. A place where new alliances can be built in new ways that didn’t exist before.
And the big thing that many women’s groups have not realized until this point - or not realized the implications - is that CEDAW is going to move to Geneva in order to be working much more closely with the HRC. That’s our baby! Our baby is moving to Geneva and we are not paying enough attention. So this is a space that needs our attention. Three, discussion on sexual rights are more open in the HRC at present. The possibility of building more solid and effective alliances between women’s and LGBT groups is very strong. So this is a space that as women and as people working on education we have to recognize is a space that is open. Education is not directly a theme but it can be brought in under many other themes of the HRC.

Back to Basics

Finally I want to come back to basic principles – what does it mean to be progressive in today’s world?
For quite some time we know that being progressive on gender equality and women’s rights transverses the traditional left-right line in a quite different way.

You can have left governments that are horrible on gender, other left governments that are good on gender; you can have right governments that are not so bad on gender and other right governments that are horrible on gender.
We know which is the best situation, and which is the worst situation, but the reality is that there is no automatic congruence between being progressive on gender and being progressive in the traditional economic sense.

So in this context what do we do? Most importantly, what do we do about socialist governments particularly if they appear to be quite progressive also on gender? , How do we advocate with them? Can we automatically assume that they will do the right thing? I think this is where I would argue that experience teaches us that we cannot make such assumptions. The proof lies not in the talking, but in the walking. So I would argue that, as we move forward as advocates, we need to develop what in DAWN we are now calling an “Accountability Benchmark”, which basically is about how we as feminist organizations ought to be working with, allying ourselves with other actors, whether it is governments or others. This applies especially to those who who claim to be our friends, more than anybody else. We know what to do with those who don’t claim to be our friends; the problem is we don’t know what to do with our friends. And that is, I believe, the importance of advocating always from a critical
stance. It is the most important bottom line to avoid cooptation.

We are grateful for Choike's (www.choike.org) transcription of this speech.
 

5.- Updates from Pamoja Ghana.

Dear Pamoja Members,

I am pleased to share with you Updates from Ghana where Government has been urged to adopt the REFLECT methodology as a participatory tool in the fight against Malaria. This compels government intervention to the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goal 6 which aims at; Combating HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases, geared to promoting Health conditions globally.

This was contained in a communiqué issued by Pamoja Ghana Network, an affiliate body of P... Read more...

Regards;

Namutebi Bernah
Communications Person
PAMOJA AFRICA REFLECT NETWORK
P.O. Box 10150, Kampala
Plot 111, Block 113, Kira Road Kamwokya
Tel: +256 - 41-542800/1
+256 - 31 -265755
Email: bnamutebi@pamojareflect.org
website: www.pamojareflect.org

Adult literacy re - invigorates personal skills for sustainability - Embrace it!!!!
 

6.- Inquiry calls for evidence on lifelong learning and sustainable development

The Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning - www.lifelonglearninginquiry.org.uk
Press Release
30th June 2008
PR48/08
Ed Melia
Ed.Melia@niace.org.uk

INQUIRY CALLS FOR EVIDENCE ON LIFELONG LEARNING AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
In spite of the growing public and political awareness of the challenge posed by climate change in recent years, there is still a huge amount to be done if this awareness is to be translated into meaningful action. Because of the role lifelong learning can play in enabling both action and an informed public debate, the Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning (IFLL) - sponsored by NIACE - is putting out a public call for evidence on lifelong learning and sustainable development. Interested individuals and organisations are invited to submit written evidence to the Inquiry by 7th August 2008.
Tom Schuller, Director of the Inquiry, comments: “As citizens almost all of us are aware that sustainable development poses huge challenges. However many of us are baffled by the complexities of the issues. This is an absolutely crucial area where lifelong learning can counter people’s feelings of powerlessness. But there remain many questions about how such learning opportunities should be developed and delivered, as well as their content. This is an area where we need a lot of work quickly to establish who should have responsibility for what, and this is exactly what the Inquiry will address.”
The Inquiry invites submissions that address the following questions:
o What does the evidence tell us about the relationship between lifelong learning and sustainable development?
o Where are the gaps in evidence in relation to this theme?
o What key messages for the Inquiry we should extract?
And in particular,
o What are the core generic skills that we need for a sustainable society?
o What are the most effective forms of education for achieving sustainable development?
o How can we ensure that there is a strong global dimension in lifelong learning, linked visibly to local concerns?
o What kinds of infrastructural developments are needed to strengthen the part lifelong learning plays in promoting sustainable development?
-ENDS-
For further information please contact:
Ed Melia, NIACE Press Officer, on 0116 204 4248 or 07795 358 870.
Hanya Gordon, Inquiry Coordinator, on 0116 204 4237 or hanya.gordon@niace.org.uk
 

7.- Press Release G8 - went out to int'l media based in Rio + UN contacts in NY-

Natália Truchi

G8 failure on food prices, biofuels, and climate change places 1.7 billion people 25% of the world s population at risk of hunger, warns anti-poverty agency ActionAid.

July 2, 2008 - Days ahead of the G8 summit in Hokaido, Japan, ActionAid launches a new report, Cereal Offenders: How the G8 has Contributed to the Global Food Crisis and What They Can Do to Stop It.

Report author and ActionAid s Food Rights Policy Associate, Ilana Solomon, said:
The insatiable demand for biofuels has caused cereal prices to rise and production to shift from food crops for global needs to biofuel crops for Northern SUVs. The G8 must take urgent action to shift grain production back to meet the needs of people, not cars.

It is estimated that biofuels production alone accounts for up to 30% of the hike in food prices. The crisis is exacerbated by climate change and failed agricultural policies. If this trend continues, ActionAid estimates that an additional 850 million people could go hungry by 2009. Eight years after G8 leaders led the world community in pledging to halve the number of hungry people, their current policies instead threaten to double that number.

ActionAid is calling on G8 leaders to act now to slow the biofuel juggernaut by:
• Supporting a five-year moratorium on biofuel expansion to prevent farmland being converted into biofuel plantations;
• Ending subsidies and targets aimed at increasing the use of ethanol and biodiesel in the US and European Union;
• Scaling up alternative renewable energy sources instead of subsidizing biofuels.
ActionAid s report also criticizes the G8 s failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, insisting that climate change is already wreaking havoc on agriculture in developing countries. Anne Jellema, ActionAid s International Director of Policy, said:

As the IPCC states, yields from rain-fed agriculture in some African countries are likely to drop by 50% by 2020 due to climate change. This projected decline in productivity is largely caused by the emissions of the polluting countries of the G8.

The G8 nations are the world s dirtiest emitters. They must clean up their act and pay the price for playing havoc with the developing world s food production.

ActionAid demands that the G8 leaders pledge US $55 billion of the UNFCCC estimated US $67 billion annual cost of helping developing countries cope with climate change. ActionAid further demands that G8 leaders agree on medium-term targets to reduce their emissions by at least 25-40% below 1990 levels and to assist developing countries in accessing clean technology.

The world cannot afford more false promises. It s time for the G8 to demonstrate real leadership and to act with urgency to deal with the world s biggest challenges of hunger and climate change, added Ms. Jellema.

ENDS

Press Contacts: Ilana Solomon (USA), ActionAid USA Food Rights Policy Associate, Tel: 202-222-5004 or 202-370-9927. ilana.solomon@actionaid.org

Shafqat Munir (Islamabad), ActionAid Asia Communications Coordinator Tel: +92-3005003959
Tony Durham (London), ActionAid Press Officer, Tel: +44 20 7561 7636 / +44 7872 378251
Notes to editors:
See ActionAid s new report: Cereal Offenders: How the G8 has Contributed to the Global Food Crisis and What They Can Do to Stop It. Available on www.actionaidusa.org
Available to the media:
Video footage of biofuel production threatening rural livelihoods in Ghana, West Africa.
Case studies of people affected by rising food prices in Mozambique, Haiti and Malawi (text and pictures) http://www.actionaid.org.uk/media/pictures