Letter from WLP President Mahnaz Afkhami

December 8, 2009

Dear Friends:

The first decade of the 21st century has been a trying time for many of our partners. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, they have faced wars, political conflict, social discord, and, more recently, suffered the effects of the global economic crisis, which has disproportionately impacted the poor, especially women.

Some of these stories have been repeated often and broadcast widely through the media. But the stories that are not often told are the ones that give us hope as we enter a new decade. It is the story of women's achievements and victories despite the calamities they have faced. The central achievement of WLP in the past decade has been the strengthening of South-South communication and the establishment and expansion of strong ties among our partners and with other like-minded organizations across national, religious, ethnic, and cultural boundaries.

The South-South communication that we have nurtured has fostered a climate of mutual learning and exchange, and helped build the strength and capacity of organizations that share similar goals and operate in similar contexts.

Mentoring between our partners in Mauritania and Morocco, for example, has helped each organization expand its working methodologies. Our Mauritanian colleagues became more adept at cultivating and leveraging local network models that have been quite successful in Morocco, while at the same time sharing their experiences working in an environment of heightened political tensions and constant threats of violence.

As a part of WLP’s peer-to-peer strategic planning initiative, which has also been successfully carried out in Nigeria and Palestine, Asma Khader of SIGI/Jordan recently traveled to work with our partner in Kyrgyzstan. She noted the experience was an important opportunity to engage more deeply with civil society and university constituencies in the country and to better appreciate the similar challenges the two countries face. In turn, our Kyrgyz partners described their meetings with Asma as “inspirational” and mentioned the “extraordinary lessons about the rise of political religion and best ways of dealing with fundamentalism” that they received from the Jordanian experience.

This model of communication and exchange also drives and deepens our approach to grassroots women’s rights advocacy and movement building. Our partners in the Middle East and North Africa have built an active regional coalition to advocate for CEDAW's full implementation and lift reservations. WLP’s Claiming Equal Citizenship campaign has brought together young activists from ten countries in the Middle East and the Gulf region to help them mobilize on the grassroots level and use social networking tools to advocate for women's rights. As a result, campaign activists in Bahrain, Lebanon, and Morocco have achieved incremental but significant victories for women and their families in their respective countries including, most recently, the passage of a new law in Bahrain eliminating fees for government-provided health and education services for children of women married to foreign nationals.

Members of Iran's One Million Signatures Campaign successfully applied strategies in part inspired by our Moroccan partners to bring awareness to ordinary women and put pressure on policy makers. They refined and expanded these strategies to an unprecedented level, creating a massive national movement that jolted a powerful, repressive regime to its core.

Their experience is especially rewarding because of the possibilities it represents for WLP as we move into the next decade of our work. Their approach is collaborative, vision-oriented, focused on the task, sensitive to the possibilities offered by new information technologies, and inclusive and non-ideological. We will continue to build on these characteristics for mutual empowerment, opening dynamic new communication channels that allow transnational partners to interact in ways that are mutually invigorating and enriching, and that augments the force and authenticity of indigenous movements.

Amid all these movements and activities, what stands out and gives us special hope is the effervescence of South-South communication and solidarity, spearheaded by young emerging leaders who, rooted in their own cultures yet not bound by ideology, can and do freely interact, learn, and support one another across all boundaries.

Warm Regards,

Mahnaz Afkhami
President and CEO