|
  Campaigns: Disaster | AIDs | Land | Governance | Peace Building
|
The
Huairou Commission is a global coalition of networks, institutions and
individual professionals that links grassroots women's community
development organizations to partners. The networks seek access to
resources, information sharing and political space. At the same time, it
links development professionals to on-the-ground practice. Currently, the
network focuses its joint efforts on five campaigns: Governance, AIDS,
Disaster, Land and Housing and Peace Building.
Objectives
The main objectives of the Huairou Commission are:
- To support and
validate grassroots women's contributions to development
- To promote tools
and methodologies for peer learning and bottom-up research and
negotiation processes among grassroots women and international
development practitioners.
Approach
The Huairou Commission's approach to development work is based on a
paradigm of collective action that is community-based and led by women.
It builds the capacity of grassroots women's organizations so that they
can influence the trends of development in their communities and
represent their views and priorities in key forums at local, national and
international levels. Huairou gives visibility to grassroots women's
solutions by placing them at the center of strategic policy dialogues and
action planning. Some of the grassroots organizations are of mixed
gender, but they demonstrate women's leadership and they focus on
empowering women.
The Huairou Commission has emerged as a platform for grassroots women to
build their capacity to act locally and to directly represent their
priorities in key local, community and global arenas. It represents a
major milestone for grassroots women in building a global movement of
self-representation. The self-representation contrasts strongly with the
former practice of being represented by intermediary organizations, a
number of whom were largely based in the professions and not singularly
grounded in the reality of rural and urban poor communities, where the
majority of Huairou members live and draw their livelihoods.
Tools for Up-streaming Lessons and Policy Agendas
The Huairou Commission and its Member Networks have
developed several methodologies that enable grassroots women to
collectively articulate and analyze their successful on-the-ground work
in such a way that they can convey their priorities in decision-making
forums.
- Grassroots Women's
International Academies where grassroots women gather to exchange
successful strategies, discuss barriers and make policy
recommendations with each other and with the support of observing
partners.
- Participatory
mapping and documentation projects that lead to advocacy and action
planning
- Peer Exchanges where grassroots
groups visit one another to exchange successful practices and
transfer these practices.
- Local to Local
Dialogues
where grassroots women convene dialogues with local authorities in
order to discuss their development needs and form ongoing
partnerships for collaboration.
- Internet Forums are a new medium
for the Huairou Commission, providing a democratic space for
grassroots women to share and debate given themes.
|
|
|
|
