Peru's
community kitchens, or comedores populares, have provided food and
a social space to the urban poor since the 1960s, as streams of
rural migrants left their homes in search of work, often settling
in squatter communities with few basic services. In
an effort to build food security in their communities, women formed
cooking collectives, bought produce in bulk and created large
kitchens that became not only hubs for distributing food to
low-income families, but spaces for neighborhood organizing on a
range of community development issues.
This
story looks at how CONAMOVIDI, a national movement of women's
popular kitchens, empowered women at a popular kitchen in a small
town recovering from the 2007 earthquake to negotiate with local
authorities on the implementation of Peru's Law of Equal
Opportunities.
The national network of CONAMOVIDI
organizes coordinators from more than 10.000popular kitchens across Peru, which have
long moved beyond a single focus on food distribution, to
facilitating projects that empower women to take on citizen
leadership roles.
CONAMOVIDI
is connected to numerous other women's networks in the country.
Among them is GROOTS Peru, an umbrella organization formed in order
to have a stronger presence in international forums with GROOTS
International, and which participated in Huairou's MDG 3 Initiative
in 2008. "CONAMOVIDI has been working to increase grassroots
women's awareness that they are not only housewives or mothers, but
bearers of rights - women and citizens," explains Relinda Sosa, a
representative of CONAMOVIDI who recently spoke as part of a
UN-Habitat-sponsored panel during the Millennium Development Goal
Summit in New York.
Sosa
joined a popular kitchen in Lima in the 1980s to provide for her
family and now works on behalf of thousands of women as a
coordinator of CONAMOVIDI's national campaigns. In one such
campaign, a pilot-project introduced in the popular kitchen in the
small town of Ca�ete, 15 local women were involved in negotiations
with local authorities around the implementation of Peru's Law of
Equal Opportunities. Through a series of workshops supported by
Huairou's MDG 3 Initiative, women were trained to become "rights
advocates" (promotoras de derechos) in areas like health and
education, increasing women's roles in service delivery in
Ca�ete.
But
the transformative effect of the workshops went beyond increasing
women's involvement in local government - it also changed their
perception of their roles in the house. "One of the senior leaders
at the kitchen was very active in her community," recalls Sosa of
one of the participants. "She was used to engaging in discussions
around participatory budgeting and economic initiatives, but she
realized she had never questioned her position at home. She was
only able to be a community leader after finishing her housework
and cooking for her husband." From the workshops, the women took
away an understanding that women's rights extends to her sharing
household tasks with men in order to fully reach her own potential.
"Today the same woman is a community housing advocate."
The
Ca�ete example is but one of many in a series of initiatives across
Latin America, Africa and Asia that illustrate how empowering women
at the community level is the first step to increasing women's
participation in local and national decision-making processes. Peer
learning and collective problem solving form the basis for women's
confidence to become actors in their communities and beyond. For
this reason, the Huairou Commission, with support from the Dutch
Foreign Ministry's MDG3 Fund, has prioritized investing in the
capacities of local women's organizations to expand existing
knowledge and connect women to government processes.
Relinda
Sosa herself is an example of the potential of locally-active women
to become national and international change agents in matters
affecting grassroots women the world over. She and other members of
CONAMOVIDI will join women's organizations from Bolivia, Colombia,
Ecuador and Brazil in Cochabamba, Bolivia, this week for the
international conference titled Exchange
on Land and Housing Tenure and Finance for Women in Latin
America, from
October 8th to 11th.
The
Huairou Commission encourages international leaders serious about
improving the fragile position of women world wide, to look at the
successes booked through women-led exchanges like these, and
actively support existing women's organizations and initiatives in
the years to come.
For more information on the MDG 3
Initiative, please contact program coordinator Sarah Silliman
at Sarah.Silliman@huairou.org.
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