The Drum Beat 426 - Women Participating in Peacebuilding

From The Communication Initiative Network - where communication and media are central to social and economic development.
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This issue of the Drum Beat focuses on the myriad ways in which women are drawing on communication strategies to create change in conflict-ridden areas around the world - opening them to opportunities to voice their own rights, to participate in governance and civic life, and to contribute to peacebuilding efforts.

Please send additional project, evaluation, strategic thinking, and materials information on communication and peacebuilding at any time. Contact Deborah Heimann at dheimann@comminit.com

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WOMEN BANDING TOGETHER: FACILITATING PARTICIPATION

1. Sajha Sawal (Common Questions) - Nepal In November 2007, the BBC World Service Trust (WST) launched a radio discussion programme in an effort to support the peace process and good governance in Nepal. Developed in cooperation with BBC Nepali, "Sajha Sawal" (or, "Common Questions") seeks to spark dialogue between those in power and members of populations that have traditionally been excluded, including women and those living in rural communities. In cooperation with a local all-women's radio station, the Trust organised its first panel discussion featuring Prime Minister GP Koiral. Recorded in front of a live audience of secondary school students and people from rural communities in Eastern Nepal, the audience raised their concerns with the Prime Minister for over an hour. Pre-recorded questions and comments gathered from community groups across Nepal were also played out for the Prime Minister's response. Kantipur and Nepal One television stations sent camera crews to record the programme, and featured it as a bulletin in their headline evening news. Kantipur later broadcast the entire programme as a prime-time television special. One future programme will feature a panel of leading female political figures and the key negotiators in Nepal's 2005 peace agreement; the focus will be the role of women in Nepal and the status of the peace process. Contact: BBC Nepali website

2. Peace X Peace - Global Peace X Peace draws on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and person-to-person contact to connect women through activism related to peace, political participation, and human rights. The purpose of the project is to raise public awareness of the role of women worldwide in peace building efforts, and in the process, challenge traditional paradigms of that role:

• Peace X Peace's Global Network links "Sister Circles" (women's groups) in the United States with similar groups in other countries in an effort to enable diverse women to communicate directly with each other - and to reach their potential as leaders and decision-makers alongside men - in a medium that is unfiltered by governments or the media.
• "Act Now!" is a telephone and email hotline providing information, links to organisations, and details about upcoming activities and campaigns related to women's participation in peacebuilding efforts.
• Voice X Voice is a growing online audio archive of interviews with women working to make change; Page X Page is a dynamic online workshop for gathering knowledge about women's activism.
• In 2003, an all-women crew filmed a documentary in the United States, Afghanistan, Burundi, Bosnia, and Argentina. The 90-minute film features interviews with women who work in each country to heal communities and cultures and to build the conditions necessary for sustainable peace. It also shows how women empower themselves for peace-related work. The central message is that, although these women's struggles differ, the ways in which they organise - and the questions raised by their means of banding together (e.g., why are women, when linked together in groups with their peers, so effective?) - are the same.

Contact: info@peacexpeace.org

3. Amazwi Abesifazane (Voices of Women) - South Africa Conceptualised by Create Africa South (CAS) and implemented in close cooperation with the Self Employed Women's Union (SEWU), Amazwi Abesifazane (Voices of Women) is a collection of memory cloths being created by women to address racial and gender discrimination in South Africa. Slightly larger than an A-4 size sheet of paper, each cloth is decorated with embroidery, appliqué, and beadwork to represent the woman's life story. The project aims to provide the women with opportunities to overcome traumas experienced during the apartheid era, as well as to recover personal, cultural, and political information. The gatherings also serve as an opportunity to teach the women about health-related issues as well as basic business skills (micro-enterprising, skills upgrading, and product development). Contact: Andries Botha c.a.s@worldonline.co.za

4. Women's Use of the Sada in Afghanistan: Dissemination, Dialogue, and Transformation - A Qualitative Report Presented to Voice For Humanity, Lexington, Kentucky by Ami Sengupta, Arvind Singhal, and Corinne Shefner-Rogers This report investigates the incorporation of gender issues into a civic education initiative carried out in Afghanistan. With funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Voice For Humanity (VFH) distributed 41,000 solar-powered digital audio players containing civic and voter education information in 21 Afghan provinces prior to the September 18 2005 parliamentary elections. These players, called Sada (or voice, in the Dari language), included 15 hours of dramas, songs, and other materials on peace, national unity, democracy, civic engagement in the election, women's rights, and other development and health issues. Each kit included a small speaker for group listening and a solar charger. "Our analysis suggests that Sada facilitated dialogue, participation and action. Empowered by information, women participated in the elections in large numbers, becoming active agents of change. At the household level, women increasingly found the courage to speak up and, where possible, negotiate their rights. By receiving relevant and timely information, women were motivated to participate as equals with men in both public and private realms. Clearly, women's use of Sada led to widespread dissemination of knowledge of women's rights and civic responsibilities, raising possibilities for gender transformations in other aspects of social and community life."

5. Through Our Eyes: Participatory Video in West Africa by Tegan Molony, Zeze Konie, and Lauren Goodsmith The issue in which this article appears, Forced Migration Review 27, is titled "Sexual Violence: Weapon of War, Impediment to Peace". Produced in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the article explores the use of locally made, participatory video designed to awareness of the health and psychosocial impacts of conflict-related sexual violence among the some 70,000 refugees and 314,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have returned since the end of Liberia's 14-year-long civil war. (It is estimated that 40% of all Liberian women have experienced sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) including rape, gang rape, sexual, slavery and physical assault.) To address these issues, Liberia-based American Refugee Committee (ARC) has designed participatory video activities in order to initiate a dynamic process of engagement and dialogue. In Guinea, for instance, a 2-week training workshop at Lainé refugee camp; participants learned how to use the equipment, engage community members in project goals, carry out interviews, and develop team skills in programme planning and filming. At the end of this training, they made a documentary on early/forced marriage - in which a refugee tells her own story - and short dramas on rape and community response to domestic abuse. ARC has found that, through community screenings of these video productions and the discussions that follow, conflict-affected communities can be empowered to raise their voices about GBV, and to seek ARC's services.

See Also:

6. Women Talk Peace - Liberia, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Uganda

7. Women in Black - Global

8. Documentation of Women's Realities in Situations of Armed Conflict

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PLEASE PARTICIPATE in a POLL on Democracy and Governance issues

The most important lesson to be learned for advancing democratic governance from the recent developments in Pakistan, Kenya, and Burma/Myanmar is:

• Better adapt democratic process to national contexts
• Expand ongoing public debate on sensitive issues
• Fuller engagement of minority populations
• Improve electoral legislation
• Prioritise building local community democracies
• Strengthen media independence and plurality
• Stronger international sanctions
• Other [please VOTE and then explain your choice in the Comments box provided online]

To VOTE, please click here - Top Right Side of the website.

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INFORMING AND ENGAGING BROADER AUDIENCES: TOOLS

9. Inclusive Security, Sustainable Peace: A Toolkit for Advocacy and Action Women Waging Peace and International Alert collaborated to produce this toolkit, which outlines various components of peacebuilding (from conflict prevention to post-conflict reconstruction) and highlights the role that women play in each phase. Designed for women peace activists and the larger policy community in conflict-affected and post-conflict countries, the toolkit is intended to meet several needs, such as by describing how women are affected by and contribute to peacemaking, peace building, and security processes, and by highlighting practical examples of women's contributions (and concrete, feasible steps for fostering their continued empowerment). As a tool for advocacy and action, this toolkit may encourage women to adopt and adapt the examples of women's strategies and advocacy initiatives for inclusion into peacebuilding and conflict prevention processes such as peacekeeping support operations or disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration and post conflict processes such as elections. It also may be useful to enhance the understanding and effective use of Resolution 1325 as a tool to hold governments, policy-makers and those involved in the development of budgets accountable.

10. Track Two: Refugees, Conflict & Conflict Resolution Published from 1992 to 2005, Track Two was a quarterly publication of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) that was designed to promote innovative and constructive approaches to community and political conflict, as an alternative to traditional adversarial tactics. Among the articles included in this thematic issue is a paper by Nahla Valji, who discusses the gendered nature of persecution of refugee women and argues for gender-sensitive attitudes and training for those dealing with asylum seekers.

11. WomenWarPeace.Org Developed by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, this portal is intended to address the lack of consolidated data on the impact of armed conflict on women and girls as noted by Security Council resolution 1325 (2000). The website is meant to serve as a centralised hub of information from a wide variety of sources, with links to reports and data from the UN system to information and analysis from experts, academics, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and media sources.

12. Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters by Sanam Naraghi Anderlini This book explores the transformative nature of women's peace activism - with a focus on women's active participation in efforts taking place around the world. With an eye to bridging the divide between women's peacebuilding and that of the international peace and security community, Anderlini seeks to show how and why women's presence, activities, opinions, approaches, and resilience matter. Drawing on research and field experience, the author examines how gender sensitivity in programming can foster sustainable peace, providing concrete examples of how to draw on women's untapped potential in this regard.

See Also:

13. Bringing Women Into Governance

14. Photo Essay: How TV Helps Give Voice to Palestinian Youth

LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

15. Women's Leadership Scholarship (WLS) - Global The aim of this programme is to create educational opportunities for women around the world who are grassroots leaders, organisers, and activists interested in issues such as gender, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, women's human rights, infant and maternal mortality, conflict resolution, environmental justice, global fair trade, agro-ecology, and sustainable development. WLS pre-applications for the 2008-2009 academic year are available January 1 through March 14 2008.

16. University for Peace - Costa Rica One of the programmes offered is a Master of Arts in Gender and Peacebuilding, which offers a theoretical and practical approach to the field of gender studies in order to educate students in the prevention, management, and resolution of conflicts (including post-conflict interventions) from a gender perspective. The goal is to empower men and women to become more effective players in the processes of peace, with the clear understanding that conflict, violence, and war have a variety of impacts upon men and women that, while comparable, are not the same.

See Also:

17. University of Tromsø - Norway Center for Peace Studies - Master of Philosophy (M.Phil) in Peace and Conflict Transformation (MPCT)

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For additional examples of how women are getting engaged in change related to conflict, please visit our Democracy & Governance Theme site

And see these, and other, related past Drum Beat issues:

The Drum Beat 344 - MDG #3 - Promoting Gender Equality and Empowering Women

The Drum Beat 411 - Democracy and Governance

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This issue was written by Kier Olsen DeVries.

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The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.

Please send material for The Drum Beat to the Editor - Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com

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