Engaging and collaborative workshops offered at the International Women’s Summit
As an organisation, the World YWCA, through its wide range of innovative programmes worldwide, focuses on developing women’s leadership to find local solutions to the global inequalities young girls and women face and to help them advocate for their basic human rights and thus find their true place in the world. The World YWCA Council, which is to be held in Zurich, Switzerland in July 2011, will be the perfect opportunity for the organisation to reflect on its work to date as well as the challenges it faces for the next quadrennium in an ever changing world.
To this end, the International Women’s Summit, to be held within the context of World YWCA Council 2011, will conduct a series of collaborative action workshops and sessions. Rather than focusing on the need for women to emancipate themselves from restriction, the discourse has deflected onto reconstructing the current condition of women. The workshops will range from a Kenyan network defiant of rape towards women, yet moderate enough to address the difficulties involved in women’s empowerment processes, and the evolution of gender relations in the domestic environment and in corporate culture; to variant approaches in remedying previous marginalisation against women living with HIV. The assorted workshops attempt to cover a wide area of the spectrum; including, creating a more stringent health care plan that will protect women living with HIV, as well as realistic methods in addressing the HIV epidemic in a country such as Thailand, where there is a prominent sex-industry. Presenters of these sessions will emphasise that women’s movements around the world can come up with innovative solutions on almost every topic, whether the issue arises in an urban environment or pertains to a lack of public services: Domestic violence in Finland, or raising funds for women in Rwanda struggling with deadly diseases such as Malaria and Tuberculosis. Overarching themes will remain, but correlations will be drawn provoking the audience to analyse paradoxes on current issues: In Middle Eastern countries, fertility is in decline; however, this has not had the inverse effect of increasing women’s empowerment.
By attending the World Council, women will show that they have already begun to take control of their own fate. As a worldwide movement, with collective thought and usage of the new media to our advantage, a positive outcome is certain. If the world has limited potential, then it is for us today to convey our greatest potential.
