Programme to promote Women's Leadership for Peace-building and Gender Justice (TIM/01/W01)
(revised 22 October 2002)

The global UNIFEM Peace and Security Programme, funded initially by DFID-UK, is supporting a component on Women's Leadership for Peace-building and Gender Justice in East Timor. Hayat Imam prepared a first draft based on an ASCENT-REDE mission in November, 2000. This was revised by Jean D'Cunha, the Senior Programme Specialist in UNIFEM Bangkok, and Lorraine Corner, then the Regional Programme Director, to incorporate developments and consultations during several UNIFEM missions in 2001.

At Leadership Training, Ermera

This programme promotes a consultative process to increase the participation of women in decision making for peace-building and gender justice. A Programme Steering Committee with representatives from all partners is being established, and a regular donor's meeting will be held to present the programme to a wider range of potential partners and facilitate information sharing and linkages with related activities. The programme has four components:

Women in Nation Building at the national level - implemented by OXFAM Australia

This component is building the capacity of women's groups and women leaders at the national level to participate in the processes of nation-building from a rights-based and gender-responsive perspective. Specifically, the component is building the capacity of women's groups and women leaders to:

• monitor the nation-building process,

• identify needs and opportunities for women to engage in specific processes from a rights-based and gender perspective, and

• obtain and employ the skills and knowledge required to successfully mainstream women's concerns and a gender perspective in those processes.

The component builds on earlier, completed activities also implemented by Oxfam Australia to support women's participation in the Constitution formulation process, and on collaboration between UNIFEM and the Gender Affairs Unit of UNTAET to train women to stand in the elections for the Constituent Assembly.

Women in Nation Building at the grassroots level - implemented by UNIFEM

The Component focuses on translating the instruments of nation building, such as the Constitution, the Parliament, the Courts and specific items of legislation into concrete terms that are relevant at the community level. It will develop ways of assisting communities to access and make use of these national instruments from a rights-based and gender perspective.

The Component will be directly executed by UNIFEM through a Programme Coordinator (PC)/Trainer who will be responsible, under the direction of the Regional Economic Advisor for Asia-Pacific & Arab States, for the development and implementation of training materials and methods in selected communities in two pilot Districts. In each District, the PC/Trainer will locally recruit then train a community facilitator who will support implementation.

The component will collaborate closely with the World Bank Community Empowerment Programme (CEP), which is establishing a framework for local government in East Timor.

Funding is currently being sought for this Component.

Tolerance Building - implemented by the International Catholic Migration Committee (ICMC)

The district of Liquica is the site for this component which is training mostly women as community facilitators to assist communities of return to rebuild relationships and to live in peace and active tolerance.

Liquica is a community struggling to resettle returnees from the Indonesian border, as well as families who fled to the hills during the earlier periods of violence and remain afraid to return. ICMC is linking the Tolerance-Building Component in Liquica to community-based trauma counselling developed under a previous UNIFEM project.

All facilitators were recruited from the communities in which they will work. As in the earlier project, at least half, and generally the majority, of trainers and facilitators were women.

This component is now in its final phase.

For more information, read a detailed report on project activities.

For a human interest piece written by Jill Jolliffe, the Documentor for the project read her article (it unfortunately fails to mention UNIFEM as the funding agency) which appeared in The Age newspaper, Melbourne, Australia, on 5th October 2002.

Engendering the national statistical system

UNIFEM, ESCAP Statistics Division and other regional experts will collaborate closely to support the Statistics Office, East Timor to establish a national statistical system that integrates a gender perspective throughout its structure and operations from its beginning.

Nov2003: This effort is now underway, and the most recent updates are available on our Engendering Economic Governance website.

Brown Bag Lunch on UNIFEM's Global Women, Peace and Security Programme

Glenda Fick, Gender Justice Adviser from the global UNIFEM Women, Peace and Security Programme, visited East Timor over 6 - 15 July 2001 in association with the mission of a team of independent experts under the same programme (the independent experts were in East Timor to assess the impact of the armed conflict on women, and the role of women in peace building). Glenda reviewed the East Timor component of the global Programme, and familiarized herself with the local context. On her way back to New York, she spent three days in the Bangkok regional office sharing her experiences. While in Bangkok, Glenda presented an overview of the global Programme at a Brown Bag lunch.

Updated 4Nov2003