Transcriptions Anne with Musimbi Kanyoro: Anne: Well I am delighted today to welcome Musimbi Kanyoro, the president of the Global Fund for Women, to speak a little bit first about herself and then we'll talk about the women's movement and all kinds of issues— whatever we'd like to talk about—in the next ten or fifteen minutes. So Musimbi: welcome and thank you so much for visiting with us. Musimbi: Thank you for having me, Anne. Anne: Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be very centrally involved in women's issues globally? Musimbi: Yes, I'm from Kenya, was born in Kenya, grew up in Kenya, so I had the opportunity actually to observe my mother who had a lot of work with women because she worked in the hospitals. And I came to realize very, very early that women had lots of work to do at home, they had difficulties getting children. I came to experience what giving birth is by looking at my mother helping village women give birth in their own homes, so I really saw women giving birth really early and I saw it was painful and hard. But I also saw women who lost their children during childbirth. So when I grew up it began to actually link the dots between women's work, their life in the homes, what they do when they have to go to work, etc., I began to see really what it means to care for gender equality and to think about gender issues and I did not do this until when I was in my graduate studies at the university that I began to actually read and connect the dots, connect. And I went back to Kenya during the time of the International Women's Year... Anne: 1985 Msimbi: 1985. And there was no way you could escape being part of the women's movement when you were in a crowd of 30,000 women meeting in our city. And we hosted that meeting and I attended many, many different workshops, I wrote pictures for many of our leaders and participated in all of the hosting things, and then life changed for me, and I have never gone back. Anne, Well people will be able to read about your career in a little bio that we have on the course, but I know that you were with the YWCA, then with the Packard Foundation in California, and then the Global Fund for Women. So now with this, well you've really had a global perspective over the many years. I'm inviting you to look back over the last ten years and let us know what do you think about the women's movement, and progress. What kinds of issues would you highlight? What do you think were the achievements and maybe the disappointments? Musimbi: Anne, I'm really privileged to be able to talk about this from the perspective of being at the Global Fund now. Because through the eyes of the Global Fund we have been looking back at the last 25 years since you founded the Global Fund for Women and that really gives me three decades of looking at the women's movement. Basically what I can say from the time that I personally became extremely involved in the early 80's and today, what I'm seeing is the more boldness of women to actually use their resilience and their power of actually wanting to be included in decision making in a much more constructive way. Because if you look at the political participation, for example, most of the changes that we see happening today, whether they are countries making new constitutions or they are about claiming the rights of women at the local places, women are not waiting to be counted or to be given things in their hands. They are actually providing the leadership itself. I can use, for example, new constitutions in Africa in these last three decades: South Africa, very inclusive of issues of women; Rwanda, Kenya -- now the latest, one of the latest, really good constitutions that has the inclusivity of women including women inheriting land, something that wasn't there before. But it didn't come just on a silver plate. It's because women advocated for these rights. So this realizing ourselves, knowing ourselves, growing in confidence, has actually been able to attract other people to hear us. People, who for many years did not see and hear women knocking at the doors, they can no longer close their ears. So today what you find is that, you find governments having the question of gender equality on their agendas. Whether they do it well or not, is not the issue, but they cannot forget it. You find even businesses, you find large initiatives, if you look at here in America, people talk of initiatives such as the Clinton Global Initiative. In those kinds of initiatives, and you could count others, that are elsewhere in the world. There is no way people are going to be once more willing, able, and bold to leave women out. Because women will not let themselves be left out. I think that is a big achievement. And another big achievement that I think we have seen even much more clearly in the last three decades is that while for many years we struggled about putting the question of violence on women as a political issue, we took a long time, it was like "domestic violence," but now we see every violence that happens to women, whether in their own homes privately, including even being able to speak about rape in marriage, which is something we didn't speak about three decades ago because we thought in marriage anything happens and a woman should just take it because she is married. And now it's a big, very, very big, large agenda on gender based violence that includes what happens in the home, what happens with family members, what happens in the outside, what happens when children are trafficked, what happens in front of the military lines, including being able to send even military people that violate women to be brought to prosecution. This is what happened with some of the work that we have funded with the Global Fund in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And it was really good to be able to see the military men that had been part of the violence on women brought to law. And then all of what has happened say, in the Hague, has also been one of the global way of realizing the rights of women, and in 1994 you may remember, we all were able to really cross the barrier when we said "what happens to women even during the time of war, including rape during the time of war, is violence against women." So I feel that this is the second area where we have seen quite a lot of improvements. Not in reducing the violence, but in the knowledge, analysis, and the willingness of women to stand and be counted and say "we are not going to let this happen to us." And finally I wanted to be able to say the third issue that I think has been really important, is realizing that education for women is so important, whether that is in formal education of women as adults people, literacy and finances and law or the girl's education. These are issues that are going to remain with the women themselves all of the time and will give us more courage and opportunity to progress and then make a difference in our lives and the lives of our families and in the economies of our countries as well. Anne: To some degree I think that you've answered my next question. But I really would like your perspective about the future, as we look, let's say the next ten years. What do you see as the challenges and opportunities? I mean you've painted a rather optimistic picture, I think, as you look back you see these tremendous gains, especially in such an issue as violence against women and education. But as we look forward, where would we focus do you think? And can we really generalize, because we may look at women in Europe, Latin America, Africa, we can't even generalize about these broad regions. Individual countries differ, individual women have different experiences. Musimbi Everything that I have said applies to all women in the world. The differences will lie in how the context makes that difference or the difference might lie in the time that sometimes a country is going through a war, a different kind of violence, or the difference might lie in individual women who have the means, the ability, and the opportunity to do something about it. But nothing I have said affects women of one region or one place. It's every woman, of every place, experiences violence. Every woman of every place longs for education and longs to have a better life. And every woman in every place is really doing something about it. There is no place that is remaining behind. So I want to talk about the opportunities of what I see. You see, first of all I must say that my optimism is not meant on saying that we have solutions for these things. But my optimism is meant in the fact that I believe that women are doing something about it, and they are asking for the change. What I see as the opportunities for the next ten years: one is that we will have a critical mass of women in decision making, because right now whether we are talking about businesses or schools or elsewhere, there is a growing number of women. We know that in primary school for example, today we can be able to say that in many countries the number of girls enrolling in school is higher than has ever happened before. So in the next few years I'm expecting that we will have a critical number of women in decision making who can actually be able to knock harder on the doors and really get inside and help to make a difference. But at the same time I'm aware that there are times when we make progress, and for every progress that we make we become a threat to the same people that we want to be partners with. So I expect that there will be certain backlashes that will happen to women. And some of them might hit us hard and we might think "what is happening? Are we making any progress?" But I don't think it's going to be like universally everywhere. So I think that for every country, differences that we might find here and there, leaders, political leaders that become conservative because elections and political changing in governments has a lot to do with the laws that happens for women. So we might have some reverse, but others will always go forward because I don't think the stream is going to go backwards completely. I also believe that the use of technology is opening new, new directions for us, because we no longer can be kept in our place by just being hidden. We will go and tweet it out. We will go and put it on our facebook. We will take classes, long distance classes etc. And we will be able to connect with others who care for the same things. And that is going to make a lot of progress for women. We are not going backwards in that area. I also think that in the next ten years, what we might actually see is begin to see also the change of how resources are allocated to women. I work with the Global Fund, and so I keep an eye very strongly on how resources are allocated, and we are still struggling to get resources that are gender allocated, budgets in our countries, in our communities, and even given directly in the hands of women to run these resources. But what is progressive there is that women's funds and individual women who actually have begun to listen, are beginning to say "we need to make a difference." And that is why you get even organizations, such as women's funds, in national countries, in regional places. Women, individual in richer countries like here in the United States who can form themselves and say they are women moving millions. Basically what they are saying is that they are going to make a lot of big noise about resources being given to women so that women can be able to run their affairs, and I do want to see some improvement and I am optimistic that there will be some improvement. And then the third thing, the other thing that I think will happen later is that there has been a lot of emphasis in these last few years in the area of reproductive health and rights for women. And new investments are being put in this particular area by private foundations as well as businesses and I do hope that they will make a difference. We can't see those kind of differences immediately because it takes a decade for us to begin to see whether women did get access to contraceptives, whether they had a safer way of giving birth to children, whether they had the information that they need. And I expect that we will begin to see after about a decade what actually all these current investments as well as the big noise about this aspect of reproductive health of women will look like. Anne: Now, individual women and some men are taking this class online and will be watching you from all around the world and so what comments, what thoughts, even advice might you have for these people who are obviously interested in the topic and many write in saying that they want to make a difference and are looking for ways to make a difference. Musimbi: If I would say anything to the people, I would say that first of all it's a privilege for those of you that are connected and when you're privileged, money is asked of you. As much as you learn, as much as the students learn, I hope that they will take into doing something local because it is when we translate what we have learned either globally or in other places and actually make that thing personal to ourselves and commit to doing something about it. I think I would say: commit, do something and act locally from what you have learned globally! That is how difference becomes important. The second thing I would say to the people taking the course, connecting with other people must become part of our everyday life that doesn't disappear because you finished with the class. It is a matter of continuing that connection all of the time and making use of it by letting it expand and scale the knowledge we have, but also create other opportunities so that people far away can actually influence what we do locally. Anne: That fits particularly with some of our goals in this class. People have formed groups in their regions or across regions because we have the Internet and people can do this. And so we have our students not only interacting with us on forums on the class, but also forming groups among themselves to interact on topics of interest to themselves or regions of interest. So you've really hit the nail on the head with regard to this particular course. Thanks so much for being with us! I really appreciate you taking the time. Musimbi: Thank you for having me! Best wishes for your class! Anne: Thank you!
