martedì 15 Marzo 2016

Le donne e lo sviluppo sostenibile

Women and Sustainable Development:
Reconnecting with Grassroots Movements
Tuesday, 15 March 2016
8:30 – 10:00 am
Church Center of the United Nations

I welcome today’s event, which places me and I am sure many of you at the crossroads of the many strands of my life as an activist for the rights of women.

I am a feminist and long-term participant in the women’s movement, starting with local groups and then branching out to national and international networks.

I am a militant Socialist, and I belong to a national party, the larger family of the Socialist International, and the global network of the Socialist International Women.

I have worked in government institutions. Local, then regional, followed by the European Parliament, and today as a member of the Italian Parliament. I hate to count, but it’s been almost forty years now!

And I am active within international organizations such as the United Nations and the Interparliamentary Union.

To help me keep these different strands together, I have always counted on grassroots organizations. Through their activities, their outreach, and their advocacy, they keep my ear to the ground, inspire me, and keep me from losing my way in the labyrinthine bureaucracies that often characterized the institutions. Grassroots organizations speak truth to power!

Just look at the strengths that women’s grassroots organizations bring to the table:
– Their ability to hear and respond to the needs of women, communities and states at the local level;
– Their leadership in policy-making and proposing pilot strategies;
– Their networking at the local, national and international levels in seeking a broader consensus on new policies.

Let me give you an example of the inspiration, support and collaboration I have benefitted from.

In the Italian Parliament I coordinate the group “The Global Health and Rights of Women.” We have thirty members – all women – from the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Our mission is to promote the Italian and international agenda on development cooperation in the areas of the global health and sexual and reproductive health, and human rights of women.

Our group was founded at the urging of AIDOS, an NGO that since 1981 has worked in developing Countries, Italy, and in international fora to promote the rights, dignity, and freedom of choice of women in the south of the world.

AIDOS proposed a standing dialogue with parliamentarians, allowing us to work in parallel. Their experience in the field, and for many years, has proven invaluable.

AIDOS monitors the implementation of commitments made by the Italian Government, and puts pressure on the Government to increase both the quantity and the quality of the resources it allocates to women’s health and rights in the developing world. It also engages in awareness-raising in- and out-side of Parliament.

We have worked together on issues such as female genital mutilation, child, early and forced marriages, a gender perspective on migration, and the dangerous linkages between migration and trafficking in women for the purposes of sexual exploitation.

I am proud of the results we have achieved together:

– The Chamber of Deputies unanimously approved the motion against early and/or forced marriages that I presented as the Group Coordinator;
– I am working on the same issue in parallel with the Italian Mission to the United Nations;
– We have held conferences on child brides as a global phenomenon and on Female Genital Mutilation in Europe;
– Italy was one of the first Countries to ratify the Istanbul Convention;
– Working with other European networks and parliamentary groups, we managed to block the “One of Us” initiative, aimed at preventing European financing from being used in activities involving the destruction of embryos;
– Most recently, we succeed in including in the new budget 15 million euros over a three-year period to be allocated to mother-child health care in development cooperation policies.

This is just one example of the mutual benefit – and the benefit to all women – of active collaboration between the institutions and civil society.

This is something we need more of at the CSW, not less. For the CSW to be truly a forum that is inclusive of new proposals and strategies, the NGOs participation is indispensable.

And to be truly participatory, allow me to conclude, we need to abandon the practice in recent years of presenting the agreed conclusions at the beginning of our works – which completely shuts out the potential contribution of civil society – rather than at the end.