Role of Women - House of Commons

Wednesday 26th November 2008

"The Changing Role of Women in the 21st Century" - House of Commons, London

The title says it all really. Firstly, it was amazing bumping into Bremley again in the seminar and having him introduce me to people after the event.

Secondly, the seminar had a nice variety of speakers who came from different personal and professional backgrounds with prominent things to say. Here is a summary of what I had gathered from their speeches, which made me think... "Yes, that's true and I agree!"

Theresa Villiers (Conservative MP)
- Highlighted major pay gap between the sexes still exist and must be narrowed down
- Evolution of the 'modern man': giving women the chance to have careers while men raised the family
- Responsibility of looking after the elderly still fall on women
- Women are under represented in the parliament but numbers growing SLOWLY
- Women feel the need to prove themselves more to men at work to prove their equality/superiority
- Apparently, David Cameron pressed a cross-party consensus to encourage women into politics
- As a woman, Theresa feels like her life is dominated by her career and has no time to start or raise a family

Janette Faherty (CEO of Avanta)
- There are no gaps in jobs between men and women across industries
- 73% women of working age are at work
- 58% of women with kids under 5 are at work
- 82% women earn LESS than men
- Suggested we need groups to support women reach the top
- Women have a DOUBLE BURDEN: working and raising the family so now have even more work to juggle than ever before. No policies or group sessions to ease this are in place
- Equality need to start at home: men need to do their share to make things easier for women

Dr Husna Ahmed (Chief Executive of Faith Regen)
- In her point of view, women in faith can tackle social inequality -> Domestic Violence was highlighted pretty strongly
- Faith is a form of identity, pursue the dignity of difference
- The need to build cohesive society within communities and be in a society where one is judged on skills, competency and nothing on the surface (Obama is a clear example)
- Question raise: Are we moving into a post-gender century???

Pauline Crawford
- Can we be post-gender? Pauline believes it is human nature not to be
- Equality Responsibility: In the last 6 years, women's role has changed but look at how conflict-areas are like
- Example of how the Titanic went down after believing it was 'unsinkable'. Lesson here ism don't build the same boat...metaphor reflected upon today's political society
- Need to create conversation between all sectors
- Good to see that women are taking responsibility for who they are! (bravo)

WorldWrite

Two months ago, I joined WorldWrite as the crew's Political Analyst.

WORLDwrite is a UK based charity with a remit to develop and provide educational projects and programmes which promote international understanding through the medium of documentaries and films. The media is the strongest form of bringing communication to nationals and the rest of the world. What I love about WorldWrite is their perception to look further to what our news is showing and be critical of what is being done about sustaining development and global equality.

The issues and stories covered are wide and I am proud to be a part of a team who are dedicated in showing people the full picture.

Currently, I am helping WorldWrite fundraise so all money can go to the work we are doing in Ghana. Rather than giving them food, blankets etc, we propose to give them a TV so they can be educated, relax and have some of the luxuries the West take for granted.

Please help raise our target by donating money to the website below. I have initiated a £2 campaign pledge for those people who feel with the credit crunch are unable to donate. £2 is nothing for us but together as a group can easily reach our target with unity.

http://www.justgiving.com/waffawants

For more on WorldWrite visit http://www.worldwrite.org.uk/index.html

Thank you for your support!

UNA - Global Business Partnership

November 24th 2008

Business partnership in a political scene is a topic I am highly interested. In this meeting, as arranged by Alison Williams, we discussed globalisation and individuals who are against MNEs doing work abroad. We also had a close look at the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which members of the UN are falling behind on.

Personally, I believe activists need to put pressure on MNEs, as well as the government, to perform duties of social responsibility in the host country they are active in. However, journalist like Naomi Klein and Mark Thomas are renowned for anti-globalisation movements and articles about how businesses like Coca Cola and Nestle as examples, are in fact causing more harm than good. Surely we should concentrate on teaching these business' to help the local community improve their status and development rather than force business' to be closed off from helping the community and further their own interest?

Gordon Brown had initiated the "World Business and Development" award to encourage business' to call for positive action. However an award is only a surface acknowledgment to supposed 'good work' business' claim they are doing... is that enough? Developed countries are putting gross and unfair subsidies on their export making their product cheaper from those coming from poorer countries ... where is the justice in that? That is NOT free trade and I think it quite hypocritical that richer states discuss the development of poorer countries but inflict harsh taxes and stamp duties on them. Business' must play a key role in achieving the MDGs - the full potential of the private sector remains untapped.

An enabling business environment encourages entrepreneurship, allows local companies to thrive and attracts foreign investment offering companies the chance to achieve returns. For this to happen, you need good governance, a reliable system, political stability (lack of corruption), a reasonable tax structure and allowance of property rights. There needs to be more trust links between the North and South to break barriers and overcoming marginal gaps between rich and poor.

All but perhaps a small handful of countries are falling behind on their MDG - we must work together to put the MDG back on the forefront of our government's foreign policy if we are to create unity to our global neighbours.

Reclaim the Night

Saturday 22nd November 2008

This march and rally was organised by the London Feminist Network, starting off at Whitehall, finishing at

Euston. Central London was closed off to women protesting in solidarity to end violence against women. The march "Reclaim the Night" is a demonstration to show that women want to feel safe at night without the threat of being raped or attacked.

I met a few women who I felt increasingly disgruntled about, particularly women from English Collective of Prostitutes – who work against everything my group is trying to do, to criminalise men who buy sex and provide sex as trade. They want sex work to be decriminalised so that those working in the industry are treated like any other employee. I understand that being recognised as an employee will give sex workers the right o better health and pay, but I do not like the system of making sex a tool for finance. Tal says no!

From WILPF, only Diane, Deborah and I attended but we made noise by shouting chants and blowing our

whistles throughout the capital. It was cold, but it was fantastic to see so many young women like me in the crowd. It was even more amazing how many more people joined us. The march was massive and hope we made people think twice.

The march ended in a rally at Euston’s Quaker House. One of the guest speaker at the conference was one of

WILPF’s neighbour, a lady from Imkaan called Geeta. I think everyone was close to tears with Finn Mackay’s speech – she is fantastic in bringing out the message. We need the government to stop anyone buying sex, having women’s bodies plastered at the back of magazines, increase funding for emergency rape crisis, more policy protection and close down men’s clubs like Spearmint Rhino club not far from my university.

Having listened to those speeches, I feel determined to write a draft letter and petition to newspapers and magazines protesting and urging them to remove massage and escort services and dirty sex pictures from their print, having the back-up of other feminist institutions across England and the UK. This will be the next thing I bring up at my VAW WILPF meeting, but I will start to look into that before the turn of the New Year.

Meeting Vijay Mehta

Saturday 29th November 2008

It was a great honour for Vijay to accept me into his team after meeting me just once at his previous London seminar. To know that someone could see potential beyond my enthusiasm and basic knowledge made me feel like I could accomplish anything.

Vijay only has two other people in the team doing so much for the organisation. I was appointed (after some general discussion) to be Action for UN Renewal's 'Campaigns Officer'. My duty will be to disperse future events as widely as possible, produce publications, gain media contact and reorganising the website. The profile of the organisation is my responsibility, so I need to give the organisation a face-lift.
It is an extremely exciting role and I know I will be gaining rich skills and experience which hopefully will land me with a paid permanent role like planned. I've already dived into advertising Vijay's visit to Scotland to as many contacts as possible.

Watch this space!

London WILPF Meeting

Monday 17th November 2008

My first time attending a London WILPF meeting, and I was very surprised that we were discussing for 3 hours.

The main discussion on the agenda was action points to be taken after the "Voices of African Women" seminars and how to implement suggestions into our campaign. We all agreed the event was a marvellous success, considering that the women now want to extend WILPF branches into Sudan and Nigeria.

The main points I initiated were related to the AGM for 2009. I stressed that members were not aware that WILPF had active working groups and needed to promote these so we have more people helping with massive bulks of research. After being made co-coordinator of vaw, I felt it was my duty to address these issues. We really only have 5 people in the group and we are doing too much.
Instead of having dead workshops with no action in the AGM, each of us will have presentations of what each working group does and give other members the chance to participate.

My suggestions went through. Now, time to get my group tightened and fixed!

Violence Against Women meeting

Thursday 13th November 2008

First time since the VAW event, us young ladies got together to discuss where to move on from hereon in.

The meeting initially had a slow start but once taking control of where the meeting was heading to, everyone was delegated research tasks ready to report in January's group meeting. There was a general consensus that I become co-coordinator of the VAW team, believing that two people are needed to lead the group. I was more than happy to do so. Hopefully now our team will have a sharper focus concentrating on prostitution, considering how big VAW really is.

Research tasks:
1/ Information on the English Coalition for Prostitution
2/ Understand research projects of other feminist group
3/ Liasion with the Trade union
4/ Summarise previous VAW event notes for desemination
5/ Research reaction from male-dominated groups against prostitution (collaborate men's group with WILPF)

UN Renewal - World Shortages & Global Security

Saturday 8th November 2008, London

I attended a joint meeting with the Action for UN Renewal and World Disarmament Campaign national conference, highlighting food security, climate change and prospects for peace.

The conference consisted of 4 speakers, Duncan Green (Head of Research, Oxfam), Prof. Lord M Desai (Economist), Rita Payne (Chair, Commonwealth Journalists Association) and of course the co/chair of Action for UN Renewal and WDM Vijay Mehta.

I was beginning to understand more and more how things interlink in terms of trade, food shortages, development, business practices and economic groundwork. Speakers illustrated how the finance system is manipulated to cover the rich and how much more emphasis needs to be put on climate change by empowering farmers and poor people to fight droughts and prepare for harvest in the worst conditions.
We have superior technology which is not globally shared and there is much research needed to employ technology to make agriculture and harvesting more efficient without back-breaking labouring and dependence on the right climate. Those that depend on farming are the ones suffering from starvation and causing security uproar.

Duncan Green's speech made me think about our food crisis very deeply, considering this is my first insight to the real problems of food shortages and climate change.
"We are entering the age of scarcity", he said, speaking of how high oil prices is bringing up food prices, and the large consumption of meat taking up valuable resources for humans. Another problem is bio fuel (diesel/petrol made from maize, sugar...etc). This is a problem because poor people are losing out on these products as food resources for their own community or potential income. Instead, the techonology of biofuel is being consumed by the rich through other means. Bio fuel is a major competitor to food prices and not entirely a win-win situation at all.

Duncan also touched upon water scarcity and carbon energy.
1/ Rivers being drained, eg. river basin in South Australia running dry
2/ Unequal access to water and access to sanitation (Duncan says sanitation is more important than vaccination)
3/ Water shortage will bring battles in countries (security issue like the fight over the Nile)
4/ In terms of carbon - we have the technology for it but not the politics
5/ To keep global warming low, we need 1ton of carbon per person (one flight per person)
6/ Food prices is not affecting everyone - Tesco's income as gone up by 10%
7/ Carbon should be rationed by price and regulation

We need to decide which route to follow: Darwinism (survival of the fittest) vs Gandhism (cooperator).
I say we need to empower women within the home, to educate and regulate these changes. The more we do as individuals, the quicker we bring about change.

In between the seminar, I had the pleasure to meet Vijay and managed to rouse his suspicion in my interest in political development, and persuaded him to accept me into his UN committee. Very soon, I could become a campaigns researcher for his team.

Voices of African Women

Wednesday 5^th November 2008
House of Commons, London

UK WILPF did an amazing job organising this event to get the voices of African women in conflict heard in parliament. Big applause having succeeded in booking every seat in the room - some even had to stand, which in itself describes how popular the event was.

Ten grassroots African women campaigner, who travelled from Malawi, Sudan, Namibia, Zimbabwe, DR of Congo and Nigeria highlighted their human struggle in surviving under conflict conditions, injustice and revolt. This was a good seminar in highlighting how the atrocities in Africa is impacting on civilians and how these situations came about. There was a lot of focus on businesses, government on all levels and African people in and out of the continent.

I learnt many things from this seminar, much of it emotional and moving in nature. African women made great emphasis on eradicating arms trade, which fuels war and escalate violence and how large corporations seem to have more power and authority with the governing of resources than their own government. One of the speakers made it quite clear how oil companies like Shell, Cheron, Texaco seem to have overshadowed the government, while the government take a back seat or focus energy on ethical cleansing like that of Robert Mugabe. This understanding has made me even more determined to look into Corporate Social Responsibility and the chaos that MNE seem to cause in host countries where they set their business up in.

Here are some questions they were asking that grabbed my attention:
*What can the Commonwealth and EU do with MNEs who have influence in Africa?
> Ask for certification of resources going out of the country and have regulations/ monitoring schemes so that resources that are exported can be traced to its final destination
> African government should have tighter control over MNE trading with rebels and direct some benefits toward host countries rather than home countries
*Who is the International Community and what are they REALLY doing?
According to the women, Africa has a very vague idea on who or what the international community is, agreeing that entity like the UN are not doing enough to prevent war from breaking out, just as we had witnessed in recent news (a war broke out not far from UN offices in the Congo). They also asked who these wars are benefiting because it isn't the people. War equals to high death toll, murder, genocide, rape, and sexual violence, of course among other things. Women and children suffer the most as victims of gross human rights. Women are continually raped, killed, abused, tortured and children used as soldiers or a tool for diplomacy (in other words, killed).
So - are men really benefiting from these war?

The issue in Africa has become complex due to human greed, insolent behaviour and desire for wealth. Governments across the globe need to work together to cease arms trade so that no more victims are innocently killed deliberately or in cross-fire. People need to be re-educated, government need tougher regulations and punishment for breaking the law (please, no more talk of death, yeah!), and need better communication with MNEs who are using their resources.

It is a huge topic and not something that can be solved or learned overnight. But considering I have no knowledge of African politics, this was a good insight to what has been going on - 10 different accounts of what is happening in each of their country, which I believe is what made this seminar a success. Women felt empowered and men wanted to join us in wanting to spread the word about their experiences.

Well done Marie-Claire Faray for your excellent facilitating and translating. It was admirable, continue all your good work sister. We're all behind you!!!!