Just Do It! Charting the Progress of the Global Women's Network wiki.

I initially started this blog to stand alongside the work I was doing on setting up the Global Women's Network (GWN) wiki. For the last four years, I've been incrementally working on creating a site which could house the largest information source on women's and and girl's organizations around the world.

While I worked on the site, I always had one foot in and one foot out....scared of diving in with two feet. I'll be using the blog to chart my jump, the development of GWN and what I learn as I work to develop it.....from concept notes, recruiting volunteers and interns, attempting to create viral content, working on a shoe string budget, balancing a day job while I do it, and all the other things that I don't even know I will learn along the way. I've met others that have successfully done this....and I'm hoping that charting this process will help others who also have similar goals of turning their dream, their project, their NGO into a reality.

What do the MDG's mean for women? UNIFEM's New Video Series

UNIFEM has just released a video series with a gendered perspective on the Millennium Development Goals. Kudos to UNIFEM for pointing out a much needed but missing MDG goal on Violence Against Women.

You can view the video series on the UNIFEM site or on Wikigender. Here's the video on the gendered perspective on eradicating poverty

Women on Opinion Pages - The OpEd Project

This weekend, I participated in a wonderful workshop organized by the OpEd Project. The OpEd project organizes workshops around the country to train women on how to write OpEds. Currently, about 90% of submissions to the country's OpEd pages are submissions by men.



I highly recommend the training as it not only gave me the tools on how to write OpEds but also taught me how to better talk about myself and my expertise. I highly recommend signing up for a workshop in your area!

What's the Effect of Grassroots Women Run NGOs?

Are NGOs run by women better suited to meet the needs of women? I asked myself this question while developing wiki (www.global-womens-network.org) content. There's an interesting study conducted by researchers at John's Hopkins University which finds that female leadership grounded in a gendered perspective can better relate to the needs of other women. What seems particularly interesting about the study is that it focused on grassroots organizations rather than large well known NGOs, which have already been the subject of documentation. Considering there are over a million NGOs in India, this study only touches the surface....and makes me wonder if similar studies have taken place in any other countries?

It's an Obama Love Fest at the AWID Forum!

While I knew that Obama was the world's preferred choice for presidential candidate both from friends, news, and just plain common sense, I'm still surprised how apparent this is at the AWID forum. This does not only speak of Obama's popularity but also about the negative impact the Bush Administration has made on women's rights globally, whether it be on reproductive rights or the war on terror.....only two small examples.

Beyond that, the AWID (Association for Women's Rights and Development) forum theme this year is "The Power of Movements." The Obama campaign was able to illustrate how powerful a movement can be, and its a movement I was happy to be part of. Obama and his new administration has been mentioned in almost every plenary and workshop that I have been in. Not only has he been mentioned, when he is mentioned, the room breaks out in applause. Today, in a plenary session filled with over 2,000 women from over 144 countries - pictures were flashed as six speakers spoke about their experiences and challenges organizing. When Obama's picture was flashed, the room literally erupted, causing the speakers to stop and see what had just happened and whose picture had just been flashed. While its exciting to see this excitement, which is ever more apparent given that the the forum is in South Africa, I hope that the excitement of a 'friend' in the White House does not lead to complacency. With the country facing a recession and leaders attention diverted to solving these pressing problems, the doors of the White House and Congress will need to continually be knocked on. I fear the rights and needs of women including the funding these issues need and deserve will not be addressed if we assume our friends will listen to us. While its great to have two friends in the White House, we can't wait for an appointment. We need to be sitting on their doorstep, continually knocking, until Obama and the new family dog let us in.....and we make them listen.

Have We Taken A Stand? Where are American Women in the Global Women's Movement?

I write this as I sit amongst over 2200 women's activists from over 144 countries at the Association for Women's Rights and Development Forum. Their combined resilience, strength, creativity, power and love is immense and yet indescribable. As I sit listening to the struggles lesbians face in the Arab world, the fight Iranian women have to be considered a whole person unlike their current worth of half a man under the law, the struggles women face in Africa as they bear the brunt of an increasing HIV rate, and all women in solidarity coming together to fight violence against women and I think of what am I doing at home. I think of the movement of domestic workers in the United States, and I wonder why I haven't known about this movement before. As American women work to ensure their reproductive rights continue, that they break the glass ceiling, receive equal pay for their work, and try to find a balance between work and home....I think of our sisters across the globe and what we can and should be doing to help them. I also look at their movements, their fight for equal rights, and I don't see the same passion amongst American women as they strive for a more equitable future. I sit here being inspired and also contemplating what I will do when I go back home, how will I take a stand, how will I bring people together, and how will I overcome my shyness to speak up. I only need to remember the collective strength and spirit of the women here, as I open my mouth to make my voice heard!

Tiny Voices Defy Child Marriage in Yemen

Interesting article on child marriage in Yemen in this week's NY Times. I like how the article shows the resilience of these girls and how they fought for their own rights. There's a snippet below, but make sure to read the whole article.

One morning last month, Arwa Abdu Muhammad Ali walked out of her husband’s house here and ran to a local hospital, where she complained that he had been beating and sexually abusing her for eight months.

That alone would be surprising in Yemen, a deeply conservative Arab society where family disputes tend to be solved privately. What made it even more unusual was that Arwa was 9 years old.

Within days, Arwa — a tiny, delicate-featured girl — had become a celebrity in Yemen, where child marriage is common but has rarely been exposed in public. She was the second child bride to come forward in less than a month; in April, a 10-year-old named Nujood Ali had gone by herself to a courthouse to demand a divorce, generating a landmark legal case.

Together, the two girls’ stories have helped spur a movement to put an end to child marriage, which is increasingly seen as a crucial part of the cycle of poverty in Yemen and other third world countries. Pulled out of school and forced to have children before their bodies are ready, many rural Yemeni women end up illiterate and with serious health problems. Their babies are often stunted, too.