 |
Gender Democracy Activities |
|
| |
- Project: Arab Women between Religious Faith and Social Justice
Project Partner: Women and Memory Forum (WMF)
Date & Place: February – September 2005, Cairo/Egypt
The WMF will organize a regional conference for a group of religious and secular feminist activists, scholars and professionals to discuss their different approaches in promoting women’s rights in the Middle East region. The WMF is an Egyptian NGO working on issues of gender and culture since 1997. The WMF main goal is the empowerment of women through providing of knowledge and dissemination of alternative gender-sensitive approaches. Since religious discourse and its influence on the status of women is also an important component of Arab culture and history, the organization researches its cultural implications on the role of women in society. Facing challenges in questions of cultural identity and women’s status the role of civil society in cooperating and addressing these issues becomes increasingly important. To create an intermediate space for religious women activists, scholars, and professionals to debate their positions between extremist conservative and extremist secular or a-religious groups the WMF organizes a regional conference in Cairo at the beginning of the project period. The meeting will aim to build a forum and a suitable space for discussing women’s concerns in the raise of fundamentalism and possibilities of religious reform from a feminist perspective encourage exchanging of experiences. The outcome of the conference shall be the outline for future activities to promote reform, equality and women’s rights within religious discourse in the region.
- Project: Online Courses on Sustainable Development and Gender Democracy
Project Partner: Gaza Institute for Development Studies (IDS)
Date & Place: June-December 2005, Gaza Strip
The IDS was established and initially funded by UNDP in December 2003 with the intention of strengthening development activities in the Gaza Strip and beyond. The IDS aims to provide access to education for as many Palestinians as possible and to relate specifically education to local development processes. Due to a severe lack of available relevant education material in Gaza, the IDS is seeking to develop high quality online specialized courses to enable students to study at their own pace from home, a relative’s home, a nearby internet café or IT centre. The IDS coordinates the development of these courses through its pool of development experts and experiences in the field. Two online courses on sustainable development and gender democracy are developed during the project period. The target groups of these courses are civil society activists and researchers in the Arab Middle East. The preparatory phase takes place in the first five months leading up to October 2005. The Mediterranean Virtual University (MVU) provides the course developers with high qualified training seminars in Cyprus during this period. The online courses will be at post-graduate level and are developed with the aim of covering a wide range of in-depth development related topics, but they will focus mainly on Palestinian development in the current context in order to provide an angle that is not usually covered. The courses will be offered by a consortium of 11 universities in Gaza and West Bank, which has been set up recently by the MVU. Two instructors are trained to familiarize themselves with the course content and will be responsible for teaching the online courses from October 2005 on. Promotional material for the IDS development online courses will consist of leaflets, posters and an MVU course catalogue that will be disseminated at universities, NGOs, youth clubs, ministries, women’s organizations and other social and developing organizations, whose members could benefit from the online courses. The evaluation process consists of submitting two progress reports to the funding agency. A mid-term report will be submitted at the end of August 2005, detailing how the project has progressed and how it has met the objectives described in the Work plan. A final report will be submitted at the end of December 2005 when the first academic semester will be over and a final assessment of the project will be carried out.
-
Project: Participation in the hbf Summer School 2005 "Engendering Economic Policies in a Globalizing World"
Date & Place: 1st to 7th of September 2005, Berlin
The neo-liberal forms of globalization have impacted upon gender relations in complex and contradictory ways and gender inequalities are shaping the global political economy. Women are specifically affected by economic and other crisis situations, since they are the main care providers in the households and communities while they lack live hood rights, and the gender bias in the allocation of resources persists. Women have been active in campaigning for global economic justice and gender equality. But still a large gap continues to exist between government commitments of the Bejing Platform of Action, which was ratified by 189 governments at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, and the "silencing" of gender issues in the agendas of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Found. The hbf Summer School 2005 aims at building capacities with regard to macro-economic policies and at the demystification of the pretended gender neutrality of trade agreements and liberalization processes. The participants will analyze the linkages between macro-economic policies and micro-economic structures, using concepts and tools of feminist economics. Participants will come from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. The hbf Arab Middle East Office sends five participants from Egypt, Jordan and Palestine to Berlin.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
