I am traveling from Kyrgyzstan to Guatemala to learn and to share:
- how women become proactive and not ask, but take responsibility for practising good citizenship inside and outside politics,
- how women unite in practical ways, both inside and outside politics,
- how women work to mainstream their own vision, strategies and power in decision-making at all levels, including within political parties,
- how women inside politics can be assisted by women’s groups from outside decision-making bodies,
- how women in decision-making bodies work for peace, justice and equality.
My aim is to share the experience of our program bringing 50 local women in to Parliament, its achievements, challenges and the lessons we learnt - and to get feedback from the prominent leaders gathered in Antigua in order to improve it. Women who are in leadership positions and governance can define some priorities from their perspective for the women’s movement, for example - what knowledge and skills or approaches they would liked to have had before they stepped into these leadership posts.
We were deeply concerned with the status of women in Kyrgyzstan and were asking how we could better our lives. Our realization that we needed a long term plan to attract women’s interest in becoming politicians led to development of the program ‘50 women to politics’ and I think the conference participants may be interested in the key aspects of the program.
The program involves local women from provinces – from village to cities – women who have potential capacity but otherwise practically have no chance to enter politics, and who know and live through the hard realities of life in provinces, with not enough drinking water, electricity, legal or medical services, etc. It is multilayered, simultaneous, long-term and countrywide: training, mobilization, analytical, financial, networking, linking with women’s movements, capacity development, making new alliances and lobbying. Training is aimed not only at capacity to win, but at capacity to be a “good” governor, a decision-maker in a high political position.
Local women lack confidence, so our program helps to increase confidence in their own rights and in their chance of winning. The new network of female politicians that develops will provide venues for regular communication, information and experience sharing. Self confidence will grow. The women-leaders will be supported by a network of groups. Capacity building will include not only training, but practical know-how to get support for their political involvement. A major challenge we face is to overcome the alienation from politics of the grassroots: both for women’s high profile groups and women-politicians! The longer women’s NGOs support and assist female leaders, the stronger and more sustainable will be the commitment of the women leaders who follow in their footsteps.
I’m going to stress how important this campaign is and ask: maybe it will be interesting to discuss in Guatemala an annual international campaign – “50 days -50 women - for 50% in politics”? We organized such a campaign in 2007 “50 days -50 women - for 50% in politics”. Nobody in my country expected parliamentary elections that year (they took place three years earlier then planned) and one woman from our program from civil society, who believed in our program, ran this 50 days campaign. Before she joined our network she didn’t even plan to be a politician, she has six children and comes from the poorest rural province of my country. Today she is one of three women from the Forum of Women's NGOs of Kyrgyzstan who became Members of the Kyrgyzstan Parliament, and we are very proud because she is making significant legislative changes, voicing women’s and peoples’ concerns inside the Parliament, and she successfully maintains links with civil society. Her name is Gulnara Derbisheva and she was a director of the NGO “Leilek Insandar”.
One of the other interesting and successful components of the program is that the women’s agenda is not limited to issues that are traditionally considered to be women’s areas of concern. The program widens women’s agenda. This conference in Guatemala is of great interest to me, because women want and must be in politics to decide on all aspects of society’s development - including peace, justice and equality. In our program we try to prepare women to work politically and professionally in subjects from budget analysis to the financial security of the country. Let me share one case – one of our 50 women from Chui province who passed the training on leadership and budget was inspired by the program to run in local elections in October 2008. She won a seat in the local council and is making fantastic achievements by using knowledge from the training on budget, gender equality legislation and violence against women. She has convinced her peers in local council and local governing organs to allocate a budget for opening a shelter for the homeless, re-opened a disused kindergarten, and has got a promise to allocate a substantial amount for a local crisis center, which wasn’t even on the agenda of the local authorities. Her name is Anara Nazarbekova. She is a head of the women’s NGO “Oikaiyn” in Karabalta.
Our experience with the program shows that there are many women at local level who are not very visible, look shy and are not confident, but who have tremendous capacity and who are able to be very effective politicians; but they need proactive and wide support from us – women activists, women’s NGOs and women’s groups. We pay a lot of attention to making gender equality, protection of women and women’s human rights part of their future agenda in their enhanced capacity as leaders . Such comprehensive and long-term approach is very demanding – and sometimes disappointing – because you can’t fulfill everything on time without extensive support. But the more you plan to do, the more you will achieve in the end. Dream higher, plan for longer, partner with more actors, work deeper! Stepping into this work requires a lot of work – first of all from ourselves.
Another thing we must do is to voice interests from women’s groups that are not part of international networks. Increasing international partnerships and sharing experience and challenges will involve more local women in shaping national policies and programs, as well as strengthen women’s voices locally. If globalization of the economic processes is under the control of international economic entities and becomes more favorable to transnational corporations, we should contribute to the globalization of women’s human rights to the advantage of women’s groups worldwide, going right down to the local level.
For example, we plan to hold an international meeting of women and security next year. This will widen our local vision of security from “no war and armed conflicts” to “no to instability”.
In Kyrgyzstan we live now in a country free from war, but does it mean that we have no problems with security? No. Stopping militarization is a core part of security, freedom from war zones should be widened to include the concept of security. We want to challenge security – do we have security – in houses from violence, in streets from violence, in states from corruption? Isn’t it a security issue if women who have the qualification to be politicians have their seats taken from them and this results in bad and non-secure governance inside countries, between and across countries? So women's participation in political processes is an issue of security. It is a reality that without women it is impossible to build a democracy for peace, justice and equality.
