Are women citizens?

How can poor and marginalised women claim their citizenship rights? What is good governance from a gender perspective? These issues were the centre of debate at the international conference Governing for Equity held in Kerala, India in October.

The aims of the conference were to build international support for gender equitable governance, and to disseminate the key findings from the action research projects carried Out by the 16 participating organisations from Southern Africa and South Asia in the Gender, Citizenship and Governance Programme of the Royal Tropical Institute of the Netherlands (KIT).

Sister Namibia was one of the five organisations participating in this project from Southern Africa. Our action research focussed on the 5050 Campaign for gender balance in elected positions of government.

We critically analysed the processes and outcomes of the many activities conducted by the Namibian Women's Manifesto Network during this campaign, and looked in particular at the impact of the campaign on the participating women in towns and villages all over Namibia as well as on political parties, parliament and the media.

Through the KIT project we have over the past two years been able to share our work, experiences and reflections with other Southern African NGOs active in the field of gender, citizenship and governance, namely the Zambia Women's Lobby Group, the Zimbabwe Women's Lawyer's Association, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies in Johannesburg and the Gender Advocacy Programme in Cape Town.

The Kerala conference provided the Southern African projects with the opportunity of sharing and discussing our research findings with the projects from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well as with academics from universities and research centres, politicians and government representatives and development professionals from the United Nations and the World Bank. Our common agenda was to understand more deeply how to combine research with action leading to social change.

Taking office

In the conference workshop "Taking office: women's political participation and representation" Sister Namibia's project was presented and discussed together with projects from Sri Lanka, India, Zambia and Bangladesh. We concluded that the institution of quotas and other affirmation action mechanisms designed to enable more women to be elected to political office is increasingly being accepted as necessary and desirable. This has led to growing debates about the political process itself in the different country contexts where such mechanisms have been introduced.

While these mechanisms are useful, they are mapped onto specific systems of political patronage and culture which require closer examination and analysis by activists who aim to establish women as political actors, since strategies will depend on this analysis.

If the aim is to empower poor and marginalised women to become equal participants in the political process then we must be able to define in the different contexts which women we will strategise to empower. We thus have to move beyond seeing 'women' as a homogeneous category.

The action research projects revealed that there is a growing desire and demand among poor rural and urban women to enter the political process and to aspire for political office. Further, the process of demanding equal representation and of supporting women who have been elected through quota systems has expanded the democratic space for women.

All the projects showed that promoting women in politics means building a constituency that will provide support but also demand accountability. A key strategy used by all the action research projects has been the consultative process -- involving women themselves in defining political representation, the quality of representation and the desired outcomes.

This in turn has led to constituency building in favour of women's equal representation in politics and power. The challenge that is before us is to analyse how the shifts in power brought about by elected women's activism can be collated to define what is 'good' about governance and how it contributes to equity.

Claiming citizenship

A second conference workshop looked at the issue of women's citizenship more broadly. Citizenship is generally seen as a 'given' set of entitlements (rights) shared equally by all who live within or belonging to a territory, a nation.

This notion of 'citizenship' obscures the inequalities and differences between people arising from their positioning across the lines of gender, class, race, ethnicity, caste, religion, sexual orientation and other categories that impinge upon their ability to claim their rights. In many societies women and men do not enjoy the same citizenship rights. Women do not for example enjoy equal rights within marriage, with regard to guardianship of children and inheritance.

The projects discussed in this workshop have helped to articulate women's voices by foregrounding the real experiences of exclusion from entitlements and rights that women face.

For example, Durbar, the largest sex workers' organisation in India, staked a claim to re-define the issues involved in trafficking into the sex trade on the grounds that sex workers are the people most affected and thus have a right to participate in articulating programmes and mechanisms to control trafficking.

The action research projects also aimed at changing the discourse about women's rights and entitlements, and have linked different sets of rights. Apparent in the initiatives undertaken by the projects is also a change in feminist debates. There is a move away from fundamentalisms -- that one set of demands for equality is equally applicable to all women.

This was highlighted by the project of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) in working on law reform for customary marriage in South Africa. While feminists have always held monogamy to be the cornerstone of demands for equality between men and women in marriage, the CALS project through consultation with women married under customary law demonstrated that this was not necessarily the most important right that the concerned women wanted to secure. The strategy thus shifted to the development of laws that protect the rights of each wife in a polygynous marriage.

Engendering governance institutions

The projects discussed in the third workshop focused on strategies for promoting good governance from a gender perspective. Engendering governance is a political process of challenging the core values of institutions and their practices; and of creating a 'public' that will demand transparency and accountability as well as participation in decisions relating to resource allocation.

Projects examined issues such as the role of civil society organisations, the meaning of participation, the strategy of working in tandem with public institutions and through alliances, and the importance of working both at the level of material practice and symbolic representation.

The obstacles faced in engendering governance institutions were enumerated as being the unwillingness of men to share power; the inadequate dialogue and collaboration of those in power with women's organisations and civil society organisations representing women's interests; the continuing under representation of women in positions of power, and the lack of mechanisms of accountability in institutions to monitor gender equitable outcomes.

The actions undertaken by the projects have been to carry out an analysis of the needs and problems of women as a constituency and women representatives in institutions; an analysis of the gender power relations within institutions that re-produce gender inequality; shifting the focus from practical needs to strategic gender interests; the building of a critical mass of gender aware leaders within institutions, and increasing exposure to experiences of good practice.

These actions have generated growing acceptance of women's participation and a greater understanding of the broad range of capacity building strategies necessary for engendering institutions. The workshop concluded that affirmative action to ensure gender equality within institutions should remain a focus, while accountability mechanisms have to be made more visible and verifiable.

The action research from the 16 participating projects will be published by KIT early next year. Sister Namibia will also publish our report locally as well as a documentation of the work of the Namibian Women's Manifesto Network on the 5050 Campaign.

This article is based on the conference report published on the KIT website. For more information visit www.kit.nl/gcg