30 Years of CEDAW

The Convention on the Eliminiation of All forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has turned 30. Siyanda has compiled a whole set of recent publications around this anniversary and plenty of other helpful sources on CEDAW which you can find here. For those who don't know yet: The UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women publishes country reports, including NGO shadow reports, on the web - usually in several languages. For most recent reports on Armenia, Cameroon, Germany, Guatemala and others, for example, look here.

Where are the Men?

In a recent workshop on gender-sensitive monitoring, I found myself with some 18 women and one man - the latter being there, as he admitted, because the group was the only one to work in a language he understood. Most participants were well informed of and experienced in gender mainstreaming. Many felt there was a continued necessity to maintain gender mainstreaming as a separate item on the agenda, lest it would be dropped altogether. But we would have preferred to be a more "mixed" group - not quarantined in the women's ward, a sad déjà vu for those among us who have been "doing gender" for decades. Maybe we should have formed sub-groups and swarmed out to infect parallel, non-gender focused working groups with the gender bacillus?

Gender and Religion - Böll documentation ready

The Heinrich Böll Foundation has completed the documentation for an exciting conference which took place in June this year, Religion Revisited. You'll find also a link to the broader multi-year project Religion, Politics and Gender Equality. My personal impressions of the conference are recorded among my June postings (3 posts, starting from Feminism and Religion), which you'll find by clicking on "June" in the BLOG ARCHIVE at the left side of this page. It includes a reflection on the workshop Feminism and Religion, facilitated by Homa Hoodfar from Canada and Iran. And here's a video trailer for the conference: click here!

A rant against shenmeyisi

Any professional discipline comes with jargon. Jargon can make communication more precise and straightforward. For example, when you drop the word "AK47", most people interested in weapons will know precisely what you're talking about and there is no need to spend any further time on explaining what you mean. Unfortunately, jargon can also make communication less effective, especially with concepts that are open to multiple, divergent interpretations. Or when people don't bother translating jargon (which can indeed be difficult when you don't know exactly what you want or need to say, to start with...). That is a serious and widespread problem in the development sector.

What GNP per what capita?

I am working on a background paper on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC has conducted its last census in 1984, very few births and deaths are formally recorded, public services are in shambles - which makes that no-one can really say how many people live in the country and how they are spread. Most of the country's economy (many sources say 90%) is classified as "informal" - people growing what they need for their subsistance, selling this and that on the market, trading goods and services, digging for gold. A large part of the trade of the rich mineral resources goes unrecorded: for example, most of the country's gold is reportedly smuggled to Uganda, whose gold exports are far superior to the amounts Uganda can produce. No-one has a clear idea of the money that changes hands in illegal arms trading - only that it must be a lot, given the abundance of small weapons in the DRC.

Milestones - or millstones around your neck?

People in development agencies like milestones - not the real life objects, but those imaginary markers which indicate that a project is progressing as planned - or not. Craftspeople, engineers, cooks and other people who work with tangible objects know what milestones they need to pass on the way to the finished product. Sometimes traditional ceremonies accompany the passing of such milestones - for example, in Germany people have a ceremony when they complete the roof structure of a house.

NGO Capacity Building - Free Resources

Networklearning offers a host of links to free on-line resources about topics and techniques that are important for development NGOs - including in French, Arabic and Somali languages. I have not studied them in detail - discover for yourself on networklearning.

Technical Solutions to Social Problems?

"If only I had teeth down there" was the title of a public discussion organised by Terre des Femmes, a Berlin-based group specialised in women's rights (Monday 20). Sonnet Ehlers, the South African inventor of Rape-aXe, presented the prototype of her "anti-rape condom" for women. Rape-aXe does not prevent rape - it only makes penetration extremely short and painful for the perpetrator: rigid barbs drill into his skin and stay there. The device cannot be removed from the perpetrator's body without medical assistance. For a graphic explanation, consult the official site. Ms. Ehlers says Rape-aXe buys time - while the perpetrator recovers from the shock of finding his parts trapped inside the "condom", his victim may get away.

Forum Theatre in Berlin

At the recent Gender is Happening one-week extravaganza by the Gunda Werner Institute in Berlin (Heinrich Böll Foundation - German blog here), Aki Krishnamurty facilitated three workshops which culminated in a public performance. For those who don't know Forum Theatre: it is a method for awareness-raising and social transformation developed by Augusto Boal as the Theatre of the Oppressed: click here for a page by the International Theatre of the Oppressed Organisation; there's also a comprehensive entry on Wikipedia. In a nutshell: professional or amateur actors perform a rehearsed play or a short sketch which demonstrates aspects of oppression relevant to the audience. In our Berlin example, Aki Krishnamurty and her workshop participants had agreed that sexual harrassment in public spaces was a good example for oppression linked to gender inequality.

Men's Forum

At today's instalment of Gender is Happening (with its German language site), two men from an informal group called Men's Forum (an inadequate rendering of the German name Forum Männer) animated a workshop recalling the history of the German men's movement, which emerged in the 1970's as a reaction to femiminist groups radically opposing co-operation with men.

Gender is Happening

Love Me Gender is the motto of a one-week extravaganza at the Gunda Werner Institute, the feminist branch of Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin: a rich succession of events around gender identity, policies and practice... A (German language) blog informs about panel discussions, film projections and workshops - including queer poetry slams and a three-day crash course in drawing comics (Title: Any Tool is a Weapon if You Hold it Right). I have joined a group of volunteer blog reporters to produce my impressions in English here and, eventually, in German on the official site. Tonight, workshop on masculinities. To be continued - this blog is going to be devoted to Love Me Gender for the rest of the week.

European Court ruling on domestic violence

Landmark Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)! On 9 June, Court members unanimously found that the State of Turkey had failed to fulfil its responsibility to protect the human rights of a woman whose violent husband had repeatedly attacked her and killed her mother. Remember the international law concept of due diligence, touched upon in my April 2009 posting? The Turkish government had failed to protect the applicant's human rights by allowing Turkish courts and police to maintain a laisser-faire attitude towards domestic violence. For full details, including a link to the complete judgement, try the international law blog IntLawGrrls! This judgement comes at a time when 47 European Ministers of Justice, united at a Council of Europe meeting in Norway, have formally committed themselves to take more effective measures against domestic violence. For information on that meeting, click here.

A plea for quality in M&E

Like the previous entry, this post is -remotely- inspired by Philipp Mayring's handbook on qualitative content analysis (in German, 10th edition 2008). Mayring is a professor of psychology --- now don't run away! Psychology can teach us a lot about assessing fuzzy development processes.
As shown in the post below, any scientific analysis rests on qualitative steps which determine what is important, how the "what" should be measured, and how the measurements should be interpreted. These steps are taken by researchers, i.e. by common mortals. There is no absolute truth (leaving aside religious beliefs) - there are only theories. Even theories that come with figures are just theories, to be confirmed or refuted in subsequent rounds of research.

Quantitative is qualitative, too...

Yesterday I read an advertisement for a body lotion scientifically proven* to better the skin of 80% of lotion users. The *footnote explained that, in a trial bringing together twenty women, 80% stated the lotion made their skin feel smoother. Does that sound scientific enough? In any case, it illustrates how you turn qualitative judgements (respondents' reported feelings) into "hard" figures, a procedure which as such is not "manipulative" but established scientific practice.

Direct democracy in Germany

At the tender age of 47 I discover that I can submit electronic petitions to my national parliament, or support existing protests against or suggestions for new laws. For Germans: Jede/r kann eine Petition beim Bundestag einreichen, bzw. bestehende öffentliche Petitionen unterstützen. Im Moment gibt es da 75, z.B. gegen die Besteuerung von Kondomen (wichtig gegen HIV/AIDS), zu Fragen des Arbeits-, Miet-, Sozial-, Steuer- und Verkehrsrechts und vielem mehr, was BürgerInnen im täglichen Leben beschäftigt. Politische Beteiligung auch zwischen den Wahlen. Hier ist die Petitionsseite - Registrieren dauert 3 Minuten.