SOUTH ASIA: South Asia Women's Network Holds Strategic Planning Workshop

The South Asia Women's Network (SWAN) found an opportunity to hold a Strategic Planning Workshop in Male (Maldives), and witness firsthand claims by scientists that the waters surrounding the Maldives have risen significantly, and that the island may disappear in less than 200 years.

In the last century, the sea level has risen 8 inches and scientists fear that in another hundred years, the sea level will rise up to 23 inches because of the alarming changes in global warming.

Maldivian Minister for Environment Dr Maryiyam Shakeela told the SWAN meeting that in the case of Maldives women and girls continue to be voiceless and two-thirds women are illiterate in Maldives but not out of choice.

“Women should be ambassadors of natural resources, and realising that gender equality is a challenge, we are setting up a new ministry of gender. Female unemployment is also still high here,” she said.

Like other SWAN countries in Pakistan too, there is concern about the affect of climate change which is playing havoc with the environment, where unprecedented floods a few years ago, played havoc, with survivors still unable to return to their homes.

As the Maldives conference was in progress, news came in about monsoon flooding in mountainous northern Indian state of Uttarakhan which has claimed the lives of thousands of people.

Environment, militancy and peace and security are some of the challenges that SWAN is seized with, and the Maldives Strategic Planning Workshop, hosted by the Maldivian Women's Network, focused on how these subjects which also affects all nine SWAN countries, could be taken further in the August SWAN annual meeting in Colombo.

Uchita de Zoysa, executive director of the Centre for Environment and Development in Sri Lanka, is now looking at the environment outlining SWAN's agenda post-2015.

He says that moving from Minimum Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals, SWAN has to identify the key South Asia Women's rightful aspirations for equity, well being, sustainability, prosperity and happiness.

"SWAN has to develop a set of regional sustainable development goals”, he adds.The South Asia Women's Network (SWAN) is a programme headquartered in The Academy of International Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, while the convener is Professor Veena Sikri.

SWAN brings women from across nine countries of South Asia: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The several issues that SWAN focuses upon relate to Arts and Literature; Women in Peacemaking; Health, Nutrition, and Food Security; Education; Crafts and Textiles; Microcredit, Livelihood, and Development; Environment; and Women in Media.

SWAN has agreed that Sustainable development must be recognised as the fundamental basis for the post-2015 development framework.

Structural changes are needed, together with a comprehensive set of SDGs, to overcome poverty and deprivation, inequality and insecurity, and the multiple converging crises of food, fuel, finance and climate change caused by the current development model that is rooted in unsustainable production and consumption patterns, combined with the foisting of inappropriate technologies on developing economies.

It was also decided in Maldives that the coordinator of Women in Media, Nandini Sihai, will be organising a workshop in Goa this year, which will train media persons from SWAN to sensitize them about issues that SWAN is involved with.

“This will mean training at the conference and taking them on field trips. After training and when they return home, these media persons will be monitored to see whether they are making any meaningful change in society”, Nandini told The News.

It was recognised at Maldives that the media is one of the strongest engines for information sharing leading to realisation of sustainable development in the region. Women in the media have proven time and again that they do bring change but with sensitivity.