Gender activists and politicians

I was intrigued, however: Why Israel? There are several areas in which Israel in general, and MASHAV in particular, has an outstanding track record of cooperation with emerging nations - agriculture and irrigation, rural development, medicine, technology, early childhood education - but what, I wondered, does Israel have to contribute in the field of women's leadership? Then I smiled as I remembered that MASHAV itself, founded way back in 1958, had been the brainchild of the most famous Israeli woman leader of them all, Golda Meir.

As Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Meir had just visited African countries on the edge of independence, and was deeply moved by the challenges facing them. She was convinced that Israel itself, with such recent experience in nation-building, could play a role in closing the gap between developed and developing countries. MCTC, directed by fellow-visionary Mina Ben-Zvi, opened three years later. Its first international seminar, on "The Role of Women in a Developing Society," produced a Declaration signed by all the participants, calling for the establishment of a permanent center in Haifa to serve as "a clearing and forwarding agency collecting suggestions, material and requests, [and] promoting future national and international activities for the advancement of women."

Golda Meir went on to become Prime Minister of Israel (1969-74). In her autobiography some years later, she wrote warmly about the Mount Carmel Center, concluding that for the participants in its programs, "Israel served as a living laboratory, because, as a student from Kenya said: If I had gone to study in the United States, I might have learned the history of development, but here in Israel I have seen development as it takes place.'" Golda (as everybody knew her) died in 1978; in 1986, the MCTC was renamed in her honor.

The official brochure defines the goal of the course: "This workshop is designed to build and strengthen civil society and the civic engagement skills of women leaders in democratic societies. Its purpose is to enhance women's leadership skills to encourage their advancement in both the public and private sectors." Rose Mnyone hails from Kilimanjaro in Tanzania where she works in community development, the coordination of women in development programs and networking among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within her district. The status of women in Tanzania, especially in rural areas, is still very discouraging, she said, "very far behind." It is mostly due to a lack of education, complicated by the size of the country, and the difficulty of traveling from place to place. "You walk for days, and climb mountains, and then you meet with women, and they tell you what their needs are, and you plan with them. But then you have to talk with the district authorities about it, and without proper transportation and computers to store information, things don't get done."

What about women in public life, in national politics, for instance? "They try to give women a chance in politics. There are women who are elected from the local level to the district level, and then to the regional level and the national level in order to represent women's issues, but once they are elected, they forget about the women who put them there. They don't go back and organize the women and think about ways of bringing them education. That's why many were not reelected in 2000. Women voters said we need to elect our own people who will come back and assist us. It was a very major change."

The issue of effective leadership "was a big reason for me applying for this course. I saw it advertised in the brochure of a friend who had been here, and I thought, let me go to Israel, maybe I can come back with a tool' which can help me mold or modify the NGOs that are under my supervision. Maybe we can create an umbrella based on feminist women, who can meet once a year and report on what they've been doing. If we have a place to talk and exchange ideas and share skills, it will have an impact on women leaders scattered all over the country."

Than Htay is a journalist by profession, and a television news editor in Yangon, the capital of Myanmar (Burma). More relevant to the present situation, she is a member of the Myanmar National Committee for Women's Affairs, which nominated her to attend the course. The Committee works in some nine important areas, among them economics, violence against women, education and culture. Htay, naturally enough, sits on the media sub-committee: "We focus on the media, periodicals and so on, and arrange discussions and manage activities on the subject of the advancement and empowerment of women." Although women in Myanmar enjoy both legal and social equality, there is clearly still work to be done in that area, and Htay was looking forward to honing her skills and learning from the experiences of women from other countries, lessons that she hoped she may be able to apply to better advance the role of women back home.

Mariella Demarco Berois from Uruguay wears several hats. She is a lawyer with a practice in her home-city of Rivera, specializing in labor law and family law, and she is involved in local politics; but more visibly, she is a deputy or substitute for one of her party's four seats in the national parliament, a position that takes her to the capital of Montevideo for six or seven weeks a year. Among the five parliamentary committees on which she serves is the Committee of Gender and Equality. Women's issues are close to her, and politics is the vehicle she has chosen for advancing them. "I am a leader," she said in reply to my question about what made her come so far across the world to attend the MASHAV course; "I saw the course advertised in our local press, and the phrase women's leadership' caught my attention. I think we women have to learn to be leaders, maybe in a new way."

I wondered aloud how Latin American societies, with their history of male dominance, are coping with strong professional women devoted to advancing women's issues. "There is a macho' culture," she agreed, and one of the consequences of the new awareness among women is that "women are doing new things, becoming famous or successful, sometimes earning more than their husbands, and many men cannot live with this. In Uruguay, the problem is solved by divorce, which is now very high. But we are the generation of transition. My three daughters are very different, they know what they want from the beginning, and the men of their generation are finding that they have to change because the rules' for living as a couple have changed."

I rendezvoused with the group in Tel Aviv, where they were to spend the day, mostly as guests of the municipality. At City Hall, we were greeted by Ruth Sofer, Advisor to the Mayor on the Status of Women, and Ronit Lev-Ari, Director of the Authority for the Advancement of Women, which is attached to the Prime Minister's Office. The high profile accorded to women's issues in Israel was impressive. Presentations and discussion topics included leadership roles of women in Israel, recent enlightened legislation on sexual harassment and a current survey on sexist stereotypes in Israeli school textbooks (and the steps being taken to revise the materials).

Of particular interest to the participants was the issue of violence against women, especially in the home. Lev-Ari took us to a bright and airy new shelter for battered women, a temporary haven from domestic violence, where women in danger can be secluded - often with their young children - until the law has taken its course and the threat, hopefully, neutralized. Although the relevant municipalities are deeply involved, the funding and coordination is at the national level, since women are never housed at a shelter in their own city.

"We have been relatively successful in this area," said course director Hava Karrie, who is a social worker by profession. "The laws in Israel are advanced, as advanced as anywhere else in the world. A lot of team-work has taken place in the last few years between legislators and policy-makers, social welfare bodies, community organizations, local authorities and the police." The police department now does sensitivity training for its policemen to effect a "change in attitude to the whole problem of abuse against women You see the change in the sentences handed down by the courts." Once the sentences were quite lenient, sometimes in a misguided attempt to try patch up a violent domestic situation in order to keep the family intact, sometimes even implying that the woman shared some responsibility for the incidents. There is still a very long way to go, but court sentences are becoming more severe, and more in keeping with the seriousness of the crime. There is an understanding that without a jail term and group therapy for the violent men (required by some judges in Israel) no real change will take place. "Women's organizations have done a lot to advance this," Karrie continued. "There is much to learn from the Israeli experience in dealing with domestic violence. Most of the countries represented [on the MASHAV course] have the problem that either they have little legislation on this issue or the laws are not strongly enforced."

Abuse of women can take other forms. Rose Mnyone has been campaigning tirelessly against the tribal tradition of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Tanzania, and has started to see results: it is outlawed now, there are efforts in rural areas to educate against it, some practitioners have voluntarily turned in their equipment, and nurses in rural clinics routinely report instances of circumcised young girls to the authorities.

Working Together

Is there any confrontation, any clash of interests, between government people and NGO activists? I asked. "There could be, but on this course it doesn't come out," notes Karrie. "They are all activists, most are not from government agencies, and the few who are fit in with everyone else. We have another course on NGO management, where we have both government and non-government people, and there it does come out strongly. In that course, we want it to come out, because it's something that's going to happen in the field anyway, and here we have a chance to deal with it in a classroom situation."

"There are many NGOs in Israel that aid women and work for the advancement of women," Karrie continued. "Some of them are specifically women's organizations, of course, but many are not. Some of the NGOs are small, and still in their early stages, so people from other countries can study them and learn how to organize one themselves. And the Israelis involved are very open, very willing to talk about their mistakes and about changes that need to be made."

Mnyone complains about the perception in her country that anyone who creates an NGO that has something to do with women is in line for funding, regardless of its motives and objectives (it may be self-serving), its professionalism (neglecting feedback, monitoring, evaluation, follow-up) and its integrity (financial accountability). "In the Ministry of Home Affairs, we have decided to prune those NGOs," she said, although part of the problem is the lack of supervision by those in government who should be responsible. But Mnyone is optimistic, and is taking home fresh ideas from the MASHAV course: "I will meet the Secretary of Local Government. If he will allow me to travel around the country and talk with other women working in development, I think I can do something to organize women's NGOs, first at the district level and then at the regional one."

One clear thread that ran through all the conversations was the value the participants placed on "networking," on hearing presentations by colleagues from other countries and realizing that the problems and challenges each faced with regard to women's issues back home were pretty universal, despite enormously different cultural contexts.

Demarco Berois: "I'm not just a gender activist, I'm a politician So I must keep up with the changing gender agenda in the world. That's one of the things that attracted me to this course The course is serious and wonderful, and we are constantly meeting people. There were things I already knew, but what was especially interesting was to discover that the same things happen in Kenya and Costa Rica and Khazakstan. And in Israel, of course. The whole course is something I want to share with women when I get back. Every day I think about what things are appropriate to share."

Mnyone: "Because the course is so international, I was able to share in the experiences of women from other countries. I thought I was alone, but I came to realize that, okay, the problems of women in my country are like those of India or Uruguay." And she was especially impressed by the work of Israel's large women's NGO, Na'amat, presented in a very stimulating manner by Brig. General Hedva Almog. Tanzania has nothing like it, she said: "We have to go back and do something."

Course director Karrie: "As part of the program, each participant gives a lecture on what she/he is doing [back home], the problems they are tackling, and so on. This takes a lot of time, but it is very important, no less important than seeing what is going on in Israel. The group worked very well together. The lectures were excellent and brought out important issues using the participants' experiences, and were followed by a lot of very interesting discussion. I think this was really the focus of the program It was interesting to hear the participants tell of the problems back in their own countries, and what they have done to try and make changes." She summed up the point: "One of the great advantages of this course, and of our courses in general, is the expansion of the participants' networking ability. They feel that they are no longer confined to their own countries, that they are no longer alone."

One of the outstanding features of the courses at MCTC, or other MASHAV courses, is their preparedness to be attentive to the priorities of the participants. The bottom line is the successful transfer of ideas and information and skills, and therefore the program has to be as relevant as possible. Karrie: "I asked them what issues they really wanted to talk about, and they said local government.' They felt that in order to get ahead and improve things, they had to get more and more women involved in local politics, so we asked women involved in local politics here in Haifa and Tel Aviv to speak with them. In addition, a field trip to kibbutzim [communal rural villages] was fascinating to them. We selected some kibbutzim where the secretary - who is something like the local mayor - was a woman, at the head of the decision-making process."

Hava Karrie got the last word on what had clearly been an energizing experience for participants and course organizers alike: "It is wonderful to see how individuals can really make a difference. It was a great experience, because there were really women who have done a lot, and what we were able to do was help them polish a few skills and give them the opportunity to interact with colleagues from other countries, and form some ideas for further activity when they go home."