Recipe for empowerment

ONE billion rising, a global act of women protesting violence, was observed this year on Feb 14. Women all around the world got together to hold events, from India to Afghanistan to the United States and South Africa. The intent of the effort — spearheaded by playwright and activist Eve Ensler — was to bring women together in a way that underlined the commonality of their problems in a world where their differences are often the basis of identity.

Reclaiming global solidarity for women is indeed an important agenda. One consequence of the post-national age has been the erosion of the roles of international institutions as harbingers of change.

As non-state actors have become increasingly consequential and small nation-states have had trouble maintaining their sovereignty, the capacity of international actors that rely on the nation-state model has come into question. In relation to women, one result has been the erosion of faith in the ability of the global to bring about change in the local. In simple terms, transnational efforts have identified global priorities but failed to produce real change in societies that most need them. Promises were made, agendas set and strategic plans developed for eliminating violence against women, reducing maternal mortality and promoting girls education.

By the early 1990s, however, it was obvious that few inroads had actually been made that would justify the expenditure and boost the argument that global initiatives by themselves could initiate the changes that would make sense in particular societies. One reaction to the failures of the global was the turn to the local. Where macro movements had failed, small, modest initiatives sustainable on a community level would be what could promote gender equality in a way that actually proved useful to individual communities.

At the beginning of the new millennium, proponents of local change argued that indigenous models filled gaps that were not visible to macro programmes developed at the global level. When women were allowed to develop small initiatives within their communities, these initiatives — whether they were stores run from their homes or homebased businesses that could be sold

Rafia Zakaria

It seemed like the problem, at least in a limited number of contexts, was on the way to a solution; money could come from abroad and fund the best locally bred ideas that could slowly make empowerment a reality

at market — survived longer and helped more people.

In sum, they were able to produce meaningful changes with sensitivity to context that was not possible with distantly developed initiatives.

The arrival of the ‘local’ was a matter for much celebration and on the global level it led to transnational organisations working for women to ally with local partners such that the global nexus was maintained with local relevance. There were examples of success in various contexts; microfinancing efforts in Bangladesh, India and Africa, women-led initiatives sustained by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, Unicef and others.

It seemed like the problem, at least in a limited number of contexts, was on the way to a solution; money could come from abroad and fund the best locally bred ideas that could slowly make empowerment a reality.

Problems erupted in 2001, when global political dynamics introduced other elements into the mix. One example was when nation-building efforts tied to the strategic interests of one country, the US, became attached to global initiatives for the welfare of women. At the outset of the invasion of Afghanistan, Laura Bush announced that the American forces were there to liberate Afghan women. Similar assertions had been made earlier about the initiatives to be made for Iraqi women.

With the arrival of these mixed motives, tied as much to warfare as to welfare, the global-local nexus was dealt a blow with local actors finding it hard to ally with international actors seen as agents of occupation and twofaced in conducting war at one level and providing welfare at another.

This location where war meets the global and the local now seems be the biggest conundrum in devising the best strategy to lead empowerment initiatives for women. In the Afghan case, for example, a report by Human Rights Watch conducted in three prisons and juvenile detention facilities discovered that the justice system remains heavily stacked against women. Half the women in Afghan jails are imprisoned because they fled domestic violence, or for ‘moral’ crimes such as fleeing forced marriages. A more recent UN report tracking the success of Afghanistan’s domestic violence laws reiterated just this finding, pointing to the reality that despite millions of dollars spent in training, lawenforcement personnel, judges and others refused to enforce the laws.

In this context, the nexus of global and local women’s groups seems to have failed to instigate a cultural change. Similar examples are found in Pakistan, where a continued onslaught on female health workers in recent months is just one symptom of the demonisation of women’s empowerment initiatives that are not religiously framed. In this case, the nexus of global and local seems unable to function, with local actors being punished for allying with international initiatives. Where the connection has not been completely eviscerated, it has fallen prey to class-based distinctions with only elite Pakistani women able to participate in global initiatives.

The biggest casualty in all of this, of course, is the initiatives that cannot be locally sustained. For example, initiatives for laws against domestic violence stand in danger of being abandoned completely for their inability to be sustained locally.