| Issue 62 (WAIS 2) Contents
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APGEST:
Women in S.E.T. in Partnership with Local Communities
Ruth E.
Lechte
Fiji team leader APGEST
(Asia-Pacific Gender Equity in Science & Technology)
My professional life was as a field worker in developing countries: energy, environment and appropriate technology for women.
When working in
Africa 20 years ago, a group
of agencies: ITDG: Intermediate Technology
Development Group, IWTC: International Women’s
Tribune Centre, World YWCA Energy & Environment, the
Greenbelt Movement of Kenya, the University of
Nairobi and others planned a science and technology
Fair to be held alongside the 1985 End of the
Decade for Women UN conference. This led to a
network of people continually in contact, and the
Once & Future Action Network OFAN Pavilion at the
4th UN Conference for Women Beijing 1995. By now the
participating groups numbered dozens. In Fiji, at
the 1997 Pacific Science Congress, ECOWOMAN
replicated these events on a smaller scale. Nairobi
and Beijing were largely NGO funded, Fiji was
supported by UNIFEM.
We were pleased with the events, but did not feel sufficient impact had resulted to influence decision makers (both in science & politics) to improve the lives of women and for poverty alleviation. It became clear that advocacy would be an important component of future activities.
OFAN grew out of the preparation process for Beijing and we worked to:
• promote equal access for females in science and technology areas including educational and scientific literacy for girls, equal access for technological training at all levels, and involvement of women in scientific and technological roles
• recognise the value of existing skills and expertise and promote linkages between formal science and women’s indigenous scientific knowledge
• strengthen the roles of women so that they are able to lead in the reallocation of resources in science & technology research and practices, and to reassess the direction, goals and ethics of research and development
• affect social change by creating an environment which enables the benefits of women’s scientific and technological knowledge to be shared and used as a common foundation for all.
OFAN and WEDO, the Women’s Environment & Development Organisation, led a SET/NGO caucus at the 1999 World Conference on Science in Budapest. This caucus lobbied persistently for the inclusion of women & science issues in the conference outcome documents, resulting in some strongly worded recommendations which helped to justify the development of the APGEST, the UNESCO program for Asia Pacific Gender Equity in Science & Technology.
Women’s networks:
• OFAN: the Once and Future Action Network - the name is meant to reflect the fact that women have always been scientists and technologists, even at the most basic level
• ECOWOMAN: the Pacific regional collective of women in science and technology
• WAINIMATE: the Pacific women’s association of natural medicinal therapy
These networks also helped lead to APGEST, and UNESCO understood the conviction that:
• women scientists must use their experiences and interests outside the lab or the classroom, and develop different ways of doing scientific research and enriching knowledge through greater inclusiveness of human talents and abilities.
• environmental science, for example, can exclude from consideration the kinds of social analyses that are crucial for understanding local environmental maintenance and degradation. Recognition of the limitations of scientific solutions to environmental problems leads to a renewed appreciation of local knowledge systems and especially women’s under-appreciated roles in these systems.
Women scientists from Asia & the Pacific met in Chennai in 1994, initially it seems to discuss their professional advancement but this soon became a concern as to their ability to attack female poverty, and that of most communities where women make up the majority of the poor. They declared that there needs to be more women in science and more work on science for women, and called for recognising, documenting, revitalising, valuing and rewarding the expertise of both scientists and local women.
The Chennai Declaration proposed (inter alia) to:
•Identify the most relevant science and technology to increase income and create enabling mechanisms which are available to turn SET into asset generation and economic growth for the poor
•Research possible enterprises and credit An interesting outcome has been SET parks in India – where women trained in science fields who cannot find employment are enabled to start their own enterprises.
The UNDP office in Manila set up an APGEN desk which worked with UNESCO
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"The growing feminisation of poverty is due in part to the inability of science & technology to address the needs of poor women." |
Paris and Jakarta to develop APGEST: poverty alleviation through the localisation of science & technology into communities. The aim was to create partnerships between scientists, technical experts and women of local communities. Women deliver change in communities – they must be further empowered.
Chennai had identified five main areas for activities which could lead to increased scientific knowledge for women/poverty alleviation, thus the APGEST research developed best practice case studies in Green Health, Renewable Energy, Bio-Based, Information, and Water Technologies.
APGEST, among other things, was to foster a partnership between end-user women, and communities, and SET experts and practitioners. This arose from the concern of the Chennai group to link professional scientists with grassroots (sometimes totally or partially illiterate) women and to interact in problem solving and knowledge transfer for poverty alleviation – not only the distinction between pure and applied science, but rather a sharing of knowledge.
The treble burdens many women scientists carry, and the problems, are understood. Whenever we went to women scientists at the University of the South Pacific for help with a project they were found to be overworked, as many women scientists are (but in this case USP is partly to blame) underpaid, mothers, community leaders, and so on. They had no time to volunteer with ECOWOMAN or whoever. Nevertheless, there were wonderful contributions from professional women for the activities of ECOWOMAN, Women in Fisheries, and WAINIMATE.
The question of professional women scientists and equity is something WISENET and others engage in. Other than that question, assuming there are some corners of time, how do we enlist women in the scientific endeavour to realise the APGEST goals?
One of the
major barriers faced by women in poverty across the
Asia-Pacific region is their lack of access to
productive skills, information & technology. The
growing feminisation of poverty is due in part to
the inability of science & technology to address the
needs of poor women. Scientific and technological
interventions frequently treat women as recipients
of knowledge, underestimating women’s role as
generators of innovation and agents of change.
Women must have access to appropriate
research processes, scientific knowledge and
technologies to alleviate feminised poverty. Korean
Women’s Development Institute
In the New Scientist 17 August 2002 Jeffrey Sachs wrote:
Without science, rich countries could never have achieved economic growth. Their failure to invest in research in developing countries is undermining efforts to fight poverty, disease and environmental destruction.
He maintains that rich countries make serious mistakes in their approach to sustainable development. They regard poverty as an issue of governance, rather than biophysical constraints. They consider economic progress is the result of market forces thus downplaying the role of technological advance and supporting science and technology in poor countries. They under-estimate the risks if we fail to invest in a deeper scientific understanding of ecological challenges – we are living with societal risks that are barely perceived.
Who sets the research agenda? In the Pacific it is certainly top down and often externally engineered, (although we have some good allies at the USP, and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community Women’s Desk for example). Any research development and application should:
• Operate from the grassroots to the policy level.
• Establish mechanisms and modalities for scientists and technologists in priority setting to promote the development and spread of eco-technologies based on the blending of traditional wisdom and practices with frontier technologies such as information technologies, bio-based technologies, renewable energy and space technologies.
• Include information empowerment, techno-logical and skill empowerment, economic empowerment (a huge proportion of all scientists are employed in the military/industrial complex and by multinational corporations but they should not be lost to our cause)
• Ensure women’s status as farmers is in the forefront
• Prioritise reduction of the drudgery of women’s work through energy sources technologies and delivery systems
Science cannot be value free any more than anything else, but can be objective if it is acknowledged that the choice of instrument, and of what we are looking at through it, reflects our values.
Social scientists, extension services, and women’s NGOs have the expertise to work in ways that empower poor women. Upskilling is required to bridge the gap between scientific and technological research and the grassroots. This would include:
• strengthening commercialisation and technology transfer skills
• science-communication skills
• gender-equity sensitisation
• skills for translating and integrating knowledge and technologies held by communities, and professional scientists, engineers and technologists in ways that are mutually respectful.
Women hold an enormous amount of local and traditional science & technological knowledge in areas such as agriculture, natural resource management, and health (aboriginal women were the first Australian scientists and technologists). This knowledge is often different from that held by men. There is a need to reflect this in research and documentation undertaken in the modern scientific and technological enterprise, and to develop mutually beneficial and respectful modes of practice that can translate and integrate across these different knowledge systems.
Women’s studies are practically non existent in the islands and the few gender studies have no feminist perspective – though many women labour mightily to slant their work in this direction. Gender studies/activities can result in the female sphere being colonised by the masculine under the guise of equally benefiting both sexes. A women’s plan of action must focus on outcomes for women because there is a consistent disregard by those in power for first peoples and women.
The United Nations Commission on Science & Technology for Development Gender Working Group Plan of Action:
Sustainable human development is development that does not merely generate growth but distributes its benefits equitably, regenerates the environment rather than destroying it, empowers people rather than marginalising them, enlarges their choices and opportunities and provides for people’s participation in decisions affecting their lives. Sustainable human development is development pro-poor, pro-nature, pro-jobs and pro-women. It stresses growth with employment, growth with environment, growth with empowerment, growth with equity.
I hope that maybe someone at this WAIS gathering, or their colleagues, can develop partnerships to drive SET innovation for poverty alleviation.
The reports and case studies from the 11 participating countries* China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Philippines, Vietnam in Asia, Fiji, Kiribati & Samoa from the Pacific* are on the Web, and 2 books were produced. The website is available for ongoing participation by the scanning teams, and for gender-sensitive scientists and technologists: http://www.unesco.or.id/APGEST
Ms Ruth Lechte is the Fiji Team Leader of APGEST, Asia-Pacific Gender Equity in Science & Technology, a program spearheaded by UNESCO. The first stage of APGEST has focused on assessment of resources, best practices and gaps in gender science and technology in the Asia-Pacific region. Ruth is also a Board member of the traditional healer’s collective WAINA-MATE, which has strong activism in biodiversity retention and WIPPAC, Women in Politics in the Pacific.