Section 3 - Educating and Partnering for CEDAW

The PKKK track of implementation will cover six provinces, with two sites each
for fishing, farming and indigenous women sectors. The Nisa track will cover five
provinces in ARMM.
The project will bring together key actors of the two components at the start, mid
term and at the end of the project so that common advocacy, lessons learned and
forward looking strategies will be shared and developed. In both components,
women and gender advocates at the provincial level will be consolidated as
CEDAW Watch advocates and linked to a national CEDAW Watch network which
engages national governance mechanisms. This exchange will sharpen strategies
on how proposals for developing temporary special measures for women’s political
participation, access to services and other ciritical areas of women’s rights may
be negotiated at local, sub-national and national levels.
To date, the UNDEF project has just completed a national inception workshop
where project teams from both the rural and Muslim women were consulted with
national government counterparts. They arrived at a shared analysis of women’s
rights issues among rural and Muslim, scanned policy and programme initiatives at
national and field levels, and defined ways to fast-track response to gender equality
gaps, human rights violations and monitor CEDAW implementation. On this basis,
the project teams refined their detailed work plans for field implementation.
For rural and Muslim women, it will still be a lot of work and a long way ahead,
but the process of getting there feels lighter and better illuminated with more allies
along the way.
Sharing the vision, sharing the load
We might feel moments of inspiration from positive responses of women in
communities but we still wonder when more women and their families will get
out of poverty, violence and helplessness. The burden is not ours alone; we have
to get back to the mainstream where big decisions are made, where resources
are allocated and persuade them again, with all the data, the tools, and the
women power behind us. The UN-GMC has to make women’s issues visible in
the Common Country Assessment. We have to influence the UNDAF priorities to
include policies, budgets, programmes that will invest in making governments
and private sectors accountable to women.
We hope to make another programming cycle right and deliver results that will
cascade resources and services to the poorest and most discriminated women.
We cannot retreat.
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