On 27 February to 10 March 2006 Women Research Institute (WRI) had an opportunity to attend the United Nations Fiftieth Session of Commission on the Status of Women in UN Headquarter, New York, USA. WRI was one of the members of official delegation of the Republic of Indonesia along with other Indonesian NGOs. Sita Aripurnami and Edriana Noerdin as the representations from WRI participated in one of the sessions.

 

Objectives:

1. To encourage cooperation with government and other social groups to ensure the implementation of gender mainstreaming strategy in order that being able to achieve gender equality in education and in work place, particularly for women who work abroad.

2. To reevaluate the policies, strategy of programs, and other efforts to enhance the participation of women in decision making processes, mainly in legislative, executive, and judicative bodies.

3. To encourage collaboration with government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to improve the quality and quantity of institutional partnerships in providing data segregation and in building network to promote justice and gender balance in all public sectors.

4. To examine the challenges and obstacles in carrying out policies and strategy of mainstreaming gender

5. To do international lobby for bringing out the importance of ratification of gender-related international conventions such as Convention on the Elimination of Forced Labors and Convention on the Protection of Migrant Workers and Their Families.

    

Outputs:

Activity	Output	Notes
1. Gender-perspective-based social and economic analyses of Indonesian situation	1. Inputs for government to the draft agreement on the enhancement of participation of women in decision making and development processes	During the conference WRI Team had been government’s partner (KPP) in the discussion   The Team has been government’s partner through being member of official delegation of Indonesian Government and in being involved in preparing Government’s inputs to the conference for its draft resolution
2. Lobby to international fora on the urgent situation of women in Indonesia	2. Raising understanding on the situation of women  in international fora and on the distinction of national contexts of women between developed and developing countries	Lobby was done through discussions in sessions, especially in NGO groups.
3. Promote cooperative works and building coalition with government at international level for better achievement of gender equality and justice	3. Understanding the mechanisms of Commission and the process of building agreement between States to promote women’s participation	It was a hard process to have collaboration with State’s Governments at international level in such forum due to tight agendas of State’s delegations.
4. Disseminate and promote the progress and problems in mainstreaming gender issue	4. Understanding the problems and strategy to address gender issue at international level.	Promotion (socialization) is underwent through involvement in the sessions of NGOs forum
5. Encouraging collaboration with countries of origin to seek for solutions of the problems related to protection of migrant  workers in countries of destination	5. Widely dissemination of agenda and problems related to the protection of migrant workers of Indonesia to the global public    6. Collaboration among NGOs working in the issue of migrant workers at Asia Pacific level.    7. Agreement on building cooperative works among NGOs    8. Agenda of collaborative work to prepare the summit conference on migrant workers of Asia Pacific region.    9. Dialogue with Open Society Institute (OSI) about protection of Indonesian migrant workers through multilateral cooperative efforts of countries of origin to urge countries of destination to address this issues	Asia Pacific network agreed on holding a meeting in July 2006 in New York to prepare for agenda of welcoming the summit which would be held in September 2006 in New York. The meeting of network was facilitated by Human rights Watch   USA Asia Pacific network agreed to have meeting in July 2006 in Taiwan to prepare for agenda of dialogues in the summit    OSI confirmed its commitment to facilitate the coalition and collaboration among civil society in countries of origin and countries of destination of migrant workers

Achievements:

To participate in the Session, WRI was represented by Sita Aripurnami and Edriana Noerdin to the Fiftieth Session of Commission on the Status of Women on February 27 to March 10, 2006. WRI, represented by Aripurnami and Noerdin, along with other NGOs representations such as Darmiyanti Muchtar from Kapal Perempuan and Sri Palupi from Institute for ECOSOC Rights (henceforth the Team), was the member of Official Delegation of the Republic of Indonesia to the Session. The Team took a role as being adviser to Government Representatives and has provided them with inputs to be proposed for finalization of the Resolution of the Commission. The issues the Team has addressed in the inputs were, among else, migrant workers and political participation of women.

The advocacy work at international level such as this has played a major role in improving institutional capacity of WRI in building network and in running its international advocacy on the issue of women and migrant workers, to be specific.

At national level, however, WRI’s international advocacy work is still far from putting strong effect on policy change. Nevertheless, from the other side of view, the success in building collaboration with government (KPP to be specific) to formulate national and international agendas on the issues of women and migrant workers has been an influential achievement for stepping to policy change.

The Team’s inputs seemed to be important for Government to affirm the arguments for Government’s proposal to the Resolution regarding participation of women in connection to poverty alleviation. There was a hard debate in the session as to the issue of poverty; and it demonstrated different interests between developed and developing countries. Yet at the end most of the inputs were adopted into Resolution.

 

Challenges, Problems, and Lesson Learnt

Enforcing cooperation with national government and foreign countries at international level was the most challenging effort for there has been interest discrepancies between developed and developing countries. On the other side, government policies on improving the status of women often obstructed by their incapability to realize such policies and by political interest of developed countries which are not in the same lane with national policies.

The problems to WRI are lack of knowledge and experience in international advocacy, especially one related to the mechanism and procedure of international conference. In addition, time limitation to prepare for its involvement in the conference was another problem. These problems have led to imperfection achievement of planned objectives.

WRI has had important lesson learnt from the experience of its involvement in the conference, albeit all those challenges and obstacles. Good preparation for such international conference usually takes quite a long time; good coordination among Team; and well planned strategy of advocacy. A good example was about the materials for conference; it was inadequate for only one flyer to cover it, for there are some important issues to address in the conference need to be scrutinized well in terms of substantial preparation as well as in terms of its physical forms, both electronic and printed files. Another thing was that Team member has to work together to formulate and make use of all the substantive materials to be presented.