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WIDE Annual Conference 2010 "Migration in the
context of globalisation", will take place on June 4-5, 2010, in
Bucharest, Romania.
This year´s
Conference marks alsothe 25th anniversary of WIDE. The UN Women´s
world conference in Kenya 1985 marked the start for WIDE when feminists in
Europe decided it was time to join hands and work together. In the past 25
years WIDE has become a strong network with 12 national and regional
platforms in Europe, bringing together over 400 organisations and working
with women from the South, form all continents. WIDE is the only European
network focusing on trade, development and women´s rights, employing three
kind of strategies to bring about change: through networking, capacity
building and advocacy. This conference will build on WIDE´s long experience,
activism and expertise.
This 2010 WIDE Conference
"Migration in the context of globalisation" will bring together
and voice the experiences of migrant women from Europe, Latin America, Asia
and Africa. And most importantly it will facilitate dialogue to come to
common positions and actions for the coming years to take. Migration is an
important process that is impacting people in Europe and worldwide.
The Conference will
scrutinize critically the European policies that affect migrant women and
men and their dynamic relationships within the societies they live and the
ones they come from. European migration policies intersect with European
labour, trade and development policies, negatively impacting on the
sustainable development of societies in the Global South. How can we ensure
that the rights of migrants are protected? How can we build towards
alternatives of global development that is based on social justice and
equality? What are the main issues in the policies we need to address and
what are the best strategies? Debate about the interdependence between
migration and development has grown significantly the past decade.
Policymakers have become aware of contributions migrants can make to
development, like remittances. The remittances migrants send to their
country of origin is in total amount higher than the total amount of aid
given by governments. There are many questions that need to be asked when
policymakers incorporate this into development strategies. Migration is
also deeply interwoven with global economic development and policies, with
people needing to find jobs elsewhere; trade and labour policies that put
migrants in insecure and vulnerable positions and an exploitation of
migrants as cheap labour force. Migration is transnational and affects
everybody.
The specific
objectives of the Conference:
- To debate feminist
concepts of migration and their linkage with economics, gender, trade
and development.
- To secure
inclusiveness by giving space to many voices, particularly of migrant
women and foster dialogue, and thus strengthen WIDE´s programme on
migration.
- To come to key
messages linked with WIDE´s mission, with the goal of developing
WIDE´s strategies to counter neoliberal macroeconomic policies and to
hold the EU accountable to its women's rights/ human rights
commitments in the external policy.
- To ensure
geographically balanced representation in the conference
thatreflectsboth, the women´s perspectives from different parts of
Europe particularly highlighting Eastern Europe and women from Asia,
Africa and Latin America.
- To provide an
opportunity for networking among participants and their organizations.
- To promote alliances
among the different women's rights agendas across the globe and
encourage participants, especially migrant women, and their
organisations to enhance their political action in the context of
WIDE´s mission and conference outcomes in countries of destination as
well as in countries of origin across the globe.
Programme of the
Conference
The Conference will take
place early June for two days and will be preceded by a Capacity Building
Day. This day focuses on introducing the concepts and building the basic
knowledge of participants on migration policies in relation to gender,
trade, economics and development. This will enable particularly
participants that are not familiar with migration, development, trade or
gender policies to actively participate in the conference. The Capacity
Building day will also facilitate networking among participants.
A broad range of topics will
be address during the Conference and Capacity Building day. It will focus
on the double status of many Eastern European states, being a country of
which people migrate from and a destination for migrants, taking Romania as
a case study. It will introduce the concepts of migrations; trends like the
feminization of migration, policies and conventions around migration.EU
immigration policies will be reviewed. It will highlight how migrant women
contribute to the GDP of European countries and of developing countries,
for instance in terms of care work they provide and remittances they send.
Also the issues that migrant women are tackling will be highlighted and the
political strategies they employ to address these problems. One of these issues
is the social costs of migration versus economic contributions. Migrant
women working in the field, like diaspora organisations, will give their
perspectives. ´Europe´ will be analysed from a global perspective that will
highlight inconsistencies and double standards between trade, development
and migration policies. One very striking example of this is that worker´s
movement within the EU is called workers mobility and when it is towards
the EU it is called migration.
The programme of the two day
Conferenceis divided into interactive plenary sessions and workshops. It
will be highly interactive so that people attending have many opportunities
to exchange and learn from each other. The sessions will set the context
for the Conference and during workshops participants can discuss the issues
on a deeper level.
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