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Global Fund for Women Tries to Shift the Paradigm

By Brian Kluepfel
Special to AsianWeek

The Global Fund for Women (GFW) celebrated its 15th anniversary this past Friday at San Francisco’s swank Fairmont Hotel. An afternoon panel discussion on the role of women in war, moderated by Penny Nelson of KQED radio, was followed by an evening dinner with speeches by GFW grantees from around the world. Newly-elected board members, including Mayan Villalba of the Philippines, were recognized.

The panel discussion on war included Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues, and Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland and more recently the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Robinson said the tone of global dialogue must change toward a healing model.

“We need a language of nurturing and listening, that is exactly the opposite of the language of war, which is about force and power,” said Robinson. She was in Kabul, Afghanistan on the first International Women’s Day. In Afghanistan, the effect of GFW funding was being felt even before Sept. 11, 2001. GWF funds are continuing to help women’s groups take a more active role in shaping the post-Taliban society (see sidebar on GFW programs in Asia), but panelist Ensler, who’s also visited Afghanistan, noted that “Maybe they’ve shaved their beards off, but the Taliban is still there. But what we (the West) need to do is make good on promises, and make women’s lives secure.”

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, a Nigerian activist who has been part of two GFW grantee programs, turned the focus to her continent and the ravages of war. “We have an expression in Africa: ‘We do not wish war on our worst enemies,’ ” she said. “In wartime there is no social fabric.”

Noting the legacy of wartime rape and other atrocities in places like Sierra Leone and Rwanda, she said “The battles are fought not only outside, but on the bodies of women.”

GFW president Kavita Ramdas spoke to a larger issue. “We don’t need to give women voice, they need to have the equal right to express their voice,” she said. “There is another kind of violence, that of 900 million women living on less than a dollar a day. And there is the environment that does not allow women’s voices to be heard,” said Ramdas.

Ensler spoke of new methods in a world plagued by conflict. “Women don’t need a role, they need to be in the center of things. Women’s response to violence is the new paradigm,” she said. “We have an artistic way of bringing pain into our bodies ... and not responding to violence with violence, but with healing.”