How should we change?

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Forum Programme

Plenary Session: Saturday, October 29, 8:30 - 10:30

How can we strive to build stronger movements and organisations that are sustainable, effective and transformative? Leaders from around the world will provide provocative insights into how to build new models of leadership, create effective mechanisms of inclusion and diversity, support intergenerational visions, expand our collective institutional capacity, work more holistically across issues, and better resource our critical work. Whether you work in a small grassroots collective or large international development agency, this plenary will both challenge and inspire you.

Lina Abou-Habib, (moderator) is currently the director of the Collective for Research and Training — Action (www.crtd.org) based in Beirut and working in the Arab region. She has collaborated in designing and managing programmes in the Middle East and North Africa region on issues related to Gender and Citizenship, Gender, Economy and Trade and Gender and Leadership. She is a co-founder and coordinator of the Machreq/Maghreb Gender Linking and Information Project. Lina has collaborated with a number of regional and international agencies (including UNIFEM, ILO, ESCWA, UNDP, UNRWA) as well as public institutions (including national women commissions, ministries of social affairs) in mainstreaming gender in development policies and practices and in building capacities for gender mainstreaming. She has also trained with the Royal Tropical Institute in both Amsterdam and Beirut. Prior to that, Lina was the Programme Coordinator for Oxfam GB in Lebanon as well as a member of the Oxfam GB Gender Team in the UK. Lina is a programme advisor for the Women Learning Partnership and the Global Fund for Women. Currently, she is involved in CRTDA's Arab Women's Right to Nationality Campaign.

Lydia Alpizar is a Costa Rican feminist activist who lives in Mexico City. She is AWID's Manager of the Feminist Movements and Organizations Program. She participated actively in youth organising and mobilisation around the Earth Summit process in 1991-1992 and worked for several years as coordinator of the Youth Programme of the Earth Council. She facilitated the participation of young women from Latin America in the Beijing 95 process. Lydia is co-founder and advisor of ELIGE - Youth Network for Reproductive and Sexual Rights (Mexico), and she is also co-founder of the Latin American and Caribbean Youth Network for Reproductive and Sexual Rights. Since 1996, she has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Committee for the Peace Council. She is a member of the Advisory Council of the Global Fund for Women and has recently become a member of the International Council on Human Rights Policy, based in Geneva. In 2000, Lydia was the Latin American regional representative to the International NGO Committee for Beijing +5. She participated for several years in the Campaign "Stop Impunity: No more murdered women", a national Mexican initiative to put an end to the killings of women in the US/Mexico border city of Ciudad Juárez. Lydia is a Sociologist and a former participant in the 2003 Human Rights Advocates Training Program of the Center for the Study of Human Rights, at Columbia University.

Medea Benjamin, a powerful and charismatic force in human rights activism, has struggled for social justice in Asia, Africa and the Americas for over twenty years. She is the Founding Director of the human rights organisation Global Exchange. Benjamin is a leading activist in the peace movement in the United States and helped bring together the groups forming the coalition United for Peace and Justice. She is also the cofounder of Code Pink: Women for Peace, a women's group that has been organising against the war in Iraq and pushing for a reorientation of budget priorities in the US to focus on health care, education and housing, not war. In February 2003, Benjamin visited Iraq and met with weapon's inspectors, women's groups and ordinary Iraqi civilians. In January of 2002, Benjamin accompanied four Americans who lost loved ones in the September 11th terrorist attacks on a trip to Afghanistan to meet local people who lost relatives during the US bombing. She also led a women's delegation to Afghanistan and Pakistan in November 2001 to investigate the humanitarian situation among the refugee population, to assess the consequences of US bombing and to hear from Afghan women's groups. Benjamin's previous work has focused on improving the labour and environmental practices of US multinational corporations, and the policies of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. She also ran for the US Senate on the Green Party ticket, mobilising thousands of Californians around platform issues such as living wage, schools-not-prisons, and universal healthcare. She is the author of numerous books. Prior to founding Global Exchange in 1988, Benjamin worked for ten years as an economist and nutritionist in Latin America and Africa for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, the Swedish International Development Agency, and the Institute for Food and Development Policy.

Enisa Eminova is a Roma woman. Her path to activism started when she was 17, as a volunteer in the Roma Education programme run by the Open Society Institute. One of the life-changing experiences of her engagement with OSI was the opportunity to take part in a leadership development program targeting young Roma women activists. As a result of this programme, she, along with other young Roma women, decided to tackle the taboo subject of Roma women's sexuality in Macedonia. They felt ready to take on the issue of their bodies serving as a metaphor for family purity and community acceptance. A controversial issue in the Roma community, a girl's virginity serves as a tool to oppress and prevent Roma girls from exercising their right to education, freedom of movement and human development, out of the notion that contact with the opposite sex endangers a girl's perceived purity. Their project, which addressed these issues head on, through research and public education, served as a model for similar initiatives in Serbia and Montenegro, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine. She has also expanded her work to focus on Roma women's empowerment and development throughout Central and Eastern Europe, most currently as the consultant of the OSI Roma Womens Initiatives, where she is responsible for networking with Roma women leaders in the region.

Pramada Menon is Co-Founder and Director of Programs at CREA (Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action), a not-for-profit organisation that works at the national level in India and internationally. Based in New Delhi, India, CREA empowers women to articulate, demand and access their rights by enhancing women's leadership and focusing on issues of sexuality, reproductive health, violence against women, women's rights and social justice. Pramada has worked in the development sector in India for the last eighteen years as an activist, trainer, planner, implementer and administrator. She was the Executive Director of Dastkar, a registered society working to ensure sustainable livelihoods for traditional craftspeople in India. Her work over the years has focused on issues related to sexuality and sexual rights, livelihoods, gender and development, social justice, and violence against women. She is on the board of a number of non-profit organisations including Dastkar, TARSHI (Talking About Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues), Janani and the North East Network and on the Advisory Council of The Global Fund for Women.

Dr Sylvia Tamale is a feminist activist and the first woman Dean of the Faculty of Law at Makerere University in Uganda. In her distinguished academic career she has received an LLB (Hons)(Makerere) an LLM (Harvard), a PhD (Minnesota); and a DipLP (LDC, Kampala). She is also an advocate of the Courts of Judicature in Uganda. Dr Tamale's research interests include Third World women and the law; Feminist legal theory and method; Gender and Sexuality; Law and the ideology of race and class; and social movements. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town and a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin. She is author of, "When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda" (Westview Press, 1999). An outspoken women's rights activist and one who challenged her leaders on their position regarding sexuality, this brave and courageous woman was last year voted worst woman of the year in a poll that was taken in one of Uganda's leading dailies.

Marcela Ríos Tobar is a feminist academic and activist. She is a political scientist researcher at the Latin American Faculty on Social Sciences, based in Chile. She has published several magazines and books about the feminist movement in Chile and Latin America and about processes of transition to democracy and women's participation. She has lived, study and worked in Chile, Mexico, Canada and the United States. Marcela was one of the founders of the Feminist Collective Bajo Sospecha, participating actively in debates and political actions in her country and region, including the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentros of the last decade.

Featuring a performance by PRIMADONA

The troupe, PRIMADONA, is composed of transsexuals/transgender and MSM individuals from Malaysia who believe that every human being should be respected and allowed to live a life of his or her own choosing — regardless of gender, sexuality, sexual appearance or orientation. They come from various backgrounds and are composed of performance artists, people living with HIV/AIDS, sex workers, HIV/AIDS consultants and peer educators. Through theatre, song and dance performance, they are committed to visibilize their communities and issues as part of society.