login

Building Constituencies - Projects


Taking the ‘voice’ entry point into exploring the politics of changing policies, and development and political institutions, to lend greater support to women’s empowerment that can promote greater justice, equality and wellbeing for all.

Projects which will be initiated under this theme include:

Cluster 1 : How Change Takes Place within the World of International Development Agencies, and How such Changes Affect Women’s Organising

Feminist Activists in Global Policy Organisations

Project Coordinator: Rosalind Eyben, Global Hub

Project Description: This project will identify and work with feminist activists working within international development organisations that are shaping discourse and policy action – it will explore their strategies and strengthen capacity to bring about change.

Project Update:

The project has had its first meeting in February in which it discussed and modified the central research questions and drew up a code of conduct for the research process.

See Rosalind and Hazel Reeves comments from the Commonwealth Women's Affairs Ministers Meeting - June 2007.

See Rosalind Eyben's report to the Global Hub Advisory Group on this project - Feb 07-Jan 08 (pdf file 223 KB)

Review of Strategic Approaches to Building Constituencies by Women's Organisations

Project Coordinator: Maheen Sultan, BRAC

Project Description: The research project will seek to document and analyse strategies and approaches used by selected women's organisations in Bangladesh to mobilise and advocate for women's rights and raise demands to the State and other rights holders.

Mobilising Resources for Women's Organising

Project Coordinator: UNIFEM, Global Hub

Project Description: This study will investigate what has happened to the funding for women's rights work as a result of the new aid modalities and architectures, and how these are and could affect women’s organising and concepts of women’s empowerment.


Cluster 2: The Challenge of Enhancing the Representation of Women in the Political Arena

Between Feminism and Fundamentalism

Project Coordinator: Islah Jad, Birzeit University, Palestine

Project Description: This research project arises from the proposition that NGOs’ discourse based on universal rights is so disconnected from its local context that it has unwittingly aided and abetted the Islamist movements in Palestine.  It looks at how Islamist and feminist secularists have targeted different constituencies and how they are accountable to them and should bring insights into the growing power of Islamist organisations.

Building Constituencies for Political Reform, Quotas as an Instrument of Change

Project Coordinator: Ana Alice Costa, NEIM, Brazil

Project Description: Brazil has the greatest experience in the weakness of quotas. There are no obligations for the parties to use them, and no one is held to account for not doing it. An international workshop was held to intervene in ongoing demands for political reform in Brazil to redress the low representation of women in national government, by drawing together lessons from successful efforts to bring women into office through quota systems.

Ana Alice has three PhD students working on her team - one looking at women's empowerment in the homeless movement, another at the history of women in women's constitutions, including the feminist direct action successes through the 'lipstick lobby' in 1998, and the third at youth in school and government.

Project Update:

The project began with direct interventions in Municipal Conferences for Public Policies for Women in Bahia and in the Bahia State Conference with the approval of a new quota system proposed by NEIM. This led to the inclusion of NEIM's proposal in the Report of the State of Bahia to the Second National Conference on Public Policies for Women that took place in Brasilia from 17-20 August 2007. Another important means of intervention in the electoral reform process was the International Seminar 'Pathways of Women's Power: International Experiences on Affirmative Actions' organised by NEIM in partnership with the Women's Caucas in the Brazilian National Congress, and the feminist NGOs, Agende and Casa da Mulher do Nordeste through its program on Women and Democracy. See the summary from this international seminar held in June.

See: Women and Politics: The Brazil Paradox, Ana Alice Costa, Open Democracy

Learning for Change: The Experience of Brazil's Feminist Schools for Women Politicians

Project Coordinators: Ana Alice Costa, NEIM, Brazil and Andrea Cornwall, IDS, UK

Project Description: This research will investigate a Brazilian feminist NGO intervention to look at whether and how training women politicians in feminist analysis and political skills makes a difference to their effectiveness as advocates for women’s rights and equality in the formal political arena.

Project Update:

See Latin America Hub page for more information on this project.

Women District Assembly Members

Project Coordinators: RPC Ghana Team Members

Project Description: The assembly is a sort of District Council. Its members are 70 per cent elected and 30 per cent - of which half must be women - appointed. The research asks:

The research has found that a lot of the women had been in political and mostly religious associations, mostly involved in community work. Their families nudged them along, and their social networks suggested to them that this might be a path they would want to follow. Factors to winning elections included being involved in and recognised by the community. Education was not as important; after the women became involved in politics, they decided education was important and wanted to go back to school. But education did not affect their getting into politics.
See also: Interrogating Policy Discourses and Practice on Women's Empowerment in Ghana project

Women in Local Government in Bangladesh and Pakistan

Project Coordinators: Bangladesh Research Team led by Zarina Rahman Khan and Saba Gul Khattak, Pakistan

Project Description: This project will investigate the introduction and enabling conditions of women into local governance and its influence on women’s empowerment, including strengthening accountability of local governance institutions to women.

Bangladesh:


There is a history of rural local government in Bangladesh, but women's entry to this in their own right is recent. In the first round of voting after laws were modified in 1997 to ensure that 3 out of 12 seats were kept for women there was tremendous enthusiasm, with 40,000 contesting for a total of 50,000 seats. The long history of NGO activism both in microcredit and social welfare and the ministry's mobilisation of women all seem to have contributed to that.

To enter the existing system, you need to have money and muscle power, but also (informally) the political parties have a hand. Since it is not specified in the law, counsellors refused to give women any role. In the five-year terms to which women were elected, there were reports of chairs preventing women from coming to meetings by various means such as violence, not notifying them of meetings or holding meetings at odd hours and in inaccessible venues.

Through a UNDP project, women in government were encouraged to network. Sixteen circulars were issued in about 6 months, giving women a more effective role, for instance by saying that one-third of meetings should be chaired by women, but male administrators kept them uninformed of these circulars. Other similar networking and mobilising projects were initiated, but since the networks are often project-based they stop functioning when the project ends.

Turnouts were much lower in the second elections. Only 2.5% of general seats were won by women. The quota system should not be there forever; it should help women develop skills and then be removed, as women generate their own skills. Many women in local government are ready to run for general seats.

Pakistan:


Thirty-three (originally 50) per cent of seats are reserved for women. Candidates run against each other and are elected at local government level. But at the district and sub-district levels, one must be nominated to run and must have more access to funds. As in Bangladesh, there are project-driven activities, but not a lot of debate or engagement with theoretical issues. One project cycle finishes and women are left where they are. Political parties network along gender lines and put up all-women panels. A zigzag pattern emerges, with more or fewer women contesting seats. In 2005, the government reduced the number of seats reserved for women from 33 to 28 per cent; a positive sign was that 60,000 women still contested.

The research involves mapping out NGO initiatives, tracing how women's voices have arisen and how demands have affected policy. Saba is also doing qualitative interviews at all three tiers of government. There is a whole debate on the subject of elites and of the nazim, the district head. Five women are district heads, but they come from political families.

Grassroots Politics: The Push for Women's Representation at the Ward Level in Post-war Sierra Leone

Project Coordinator: Hussaintu Abdullah

Project Description: This study aims to illuminate the pathways of women's political empowerment, the relationship between political participation and change and interrogate the effectiveness of the decentralisation commission in empowering women.

Newly independent in 1961, Sierra Leone by 1978 was a one-party state. The civil ward started in 1991. In 2004 local government elections were held after a gap of 32 years as part of decentralisation and political restructuring after the war. In that election, 10 per cent were women and 10 per cent elected counsellors. Half of the members of development committees had to be women.

Hussainatu is studying these women - where they come from, what they are doing, whether they are in line with their party. How do women mobilise and learn what is happening - do women even know what is happening at the local level? What different pathways do women take in a post-war situation?


Cluster 3: Mediation of Violence and Conflict by Women and the Use of Institutionalised Mechanisms for Reducing Women’s Vulnerability to Violence and Other Forms of Abuse

Pathways of Empowerment in Countries in Crisis: Implementing Resolution 1325

Project Description: This study will explore, within the framework of Security Council Resolution 1325, the role and impact of global policy actors, institutions and processes in opening or blocking pathways of women’s empowerment in countries experiencing such conflict.

Update:

Naomi Hossain, Coordinator of the Governance Research Group, Research and Evaluation Division, BRAC spent a month in Afghanistan in July/August 2007 on behalf of UNIFEM carrying out a baseline to prepare a programme on community-based approaches for the prevention of sex and gender based violence and to increase women's participation in peace building. She met various NGOs, women's organisations, development agencies and the Human Rights Commission and carried out focus group discussions with women and men outside Kabul and interviewed women politicians. Naomi found the general levels of violence and insecurity very high and women very open to talking about Violence Against Women. Suicide rates are high with some areas like Herat even reporting 'epidemics'. Self-immolation is prevalent. She found a prevalence of a rights-based discourse based on interpretation of rights in Islam. The experience of millions of refugees who went to Pakistan and were exposed to a different reality and culture would seem to have opened up 'pathways of change' for people in general and women in particular. Many of the national NGOs were born out of the work with refugees.

Female Preachers in Gaza

Project Coordinator: Nahda Shehada, Birzeit University, Palestine

Project Description: The project will examine the scope of the political activism of dâ‘iyyât (female preachers) in comparison with other women’s activism, and in particular explore how the ‘classical’ secular women’s movement in Palestine is countered by another ideology, which focuses on faith as a way to free the human subject from prevalent social and political injustices. 

Pathways of Women's Empowerment through Legal Strategies: The Case of Maria da Penha Law

Project Coordinator: Silvia de Aquino, NEIM, Brazil

Project Description: The Maria da Penha Law was passed in Brazil on 22 September 2006 and was the first federal Brazilian Law addressing violence against women. This project investigates women's struggles and pathways for the implementation and monitoring of public policies addressing violence against women.

Project Update:

This project was launched with the creation of the Maria da Penha Law Observatory Consortium (LMP Consortium), under the national coordination of NEIM (Cecilia Sardenberg as National Coordinator and Silvia de Aquino as Regional Coordinator), with the support of AGENDE and CEPIA, two of the major feminist NGOs in Brazil. This came about in May 2007 when NEIM, in association with 11 other Brazilian organisations, including university research centres, NGOs and feminist networks, won the public bidding proposed by the Special Secretariat for Policies for Women of the Federal Government to create this Observatory that will monitor the implementation of the Maria da Penha Law in all the 27 Brazilian states. In addition to the funding from the National Government, additional funding has been provided by DFID, NOVIB, OXFAM and UNFPA, for in spite of the Observatory coming about as a result of public bidding, this monitoring process is an independent undertaking, a civil society enterprise. NEIM have since been participating in a number of meetings with the other organisations, as well as with representatives from the Special Secretariat for Public Policies for Women, including the Minister, Nilceia Freire, to organise the observatory.

The Maria da Penha Law was passed in Brazil on 22 September 2006 and owes its name to a woman, who, in 1983, was shot by her husband whilst she was asleep. She sustained terrible injuries resulting in paraplegia, but on her return from hospital, Maria's husband attempted to electrocute her in the bath. The couple subsequently separated and Maria da Penha alleged that her husband had assaulted both her and her daughters throughout their marriage. The public prosecutor filed charges against Mr Heredia Viveiros, Maria's husband, but the case languished for eight years before he was found guilty and following an appeal, 15 years passed without conclusion to the case. Maria, together with the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights (CLADEM) finally brought the case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asserting the Brazilian State’s obligation to respect the rights set forth in the American Convention on Human Rights, the right to a fair trial, the right to equal protection and the right to judicial protection, respectively.

The Maria da Penha Law classifies domestic violence as one of the forms of
human rights violations. It alters the Penal Code and makes it possible to arrest aggressors in the act, or to have them arrested preventively when they threaten the woman’s physical integrity. It also provides for new measures of protection for women whose lives are threatened, such as removal of the aggressor from the home and
prohibiting him from physically coming close to the victim and her children.

In August this year, NEIM participated in a meeting of the Women's Rights Commission of the Bahian State Parliament where the Parliament joined as partners in ensuring the implementation of the Maria da Penha Law. They also had the opportunity of being in the audience of a meeting on 'The Reform of the Justice Sector of the State of Bahia and the Creation of the Domestic and Familiar Violence Against Women Courts', organised by the Women's Rights Commission of the local government. Speakers included, Elizabeth Garcez, Judge from the first Brazilian Domestic and Familiar Violence Against Women court. Two important announcements were made at the meeting. The public defence representative said that the institution she represented encouraged full implementation of the Law and would support reinforcement within other public sectors. The Justice Tribunal of the State of Bahia Vice President announced she would be taking on the commitment of promoting the creation of a specialised court within the Justice Tribunal.

NEIM took part in activities which marked the first anniversary of the sanctioning of the Maria da Penha Law on 7 August 2007, organised by the Work Group for the Articulation of Attention Net for Women in Violence Situations. A group of women, representatives from the Work Group and other civil society sectors, occupied the entrance to the Bahian State Parliament. The aim was to make the public aware of the legal text and also to emphasise the necessity of creating specialised courts. In the afternoon they attended a meeting with the President of the State Parliament to propose an amendment to the Justice Organisation Law demanding the creation of specialised courts. After the meeting, they attended the Plenary Assembly where their presence was announced by the President of the State Parliament. Following that, all members of the parliament who stood to talk mentioned the importance of the Maria da Penha Law.

The 7 August activities gained a lot of coverage in the regional press, with a full page article on the Maria da Penha Law and a mention of the women's movement occupation of the State Parliament entrance. Silvia de Aquino and another colleague from the Work Group were interviewed live by a local TV station and recorded an interview for transmission on an evening news programme.

Further Reading:

Article on Domestic Violence Bill in Ghana by Takyiwaa Manuh on the West Africa Hub page and 'African Women and Domestic Violence', Takyiwaa Manuh for openDemocracy, 26 November 2007

NEIM Website

Maria da Penha Law: Retrains Domestic and Family Violence Against Women, Special Secretariat for Women's Policies, Presidency of the Republic, Brazil, 2006

Brazil: Case No 12.051, Maria da Penha Maia Fernandes, Women's Link Worldwide