DEVELOPMENT-JAMAICA: The Power of One Woman Talking

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dionne Jackson Miller

KINGSTON, Sep 16 2005 (IPS) - The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which will be under the global microscope for the next 10 years at least, are laudable, ambitious and necessary. For women’s activist Carmen Griffiths, they are also largely irrelevant.

Griffith is executive director of the Construction Resource and Development Centre (CRDC), a non-governmental organisation that trains women for construction projects, works on community sanitation projects and does advocacy and gender work.

Over a year ago, Griffiths partnered with Shirley Lindo, a community business consultant who was teaching entrepreneurship in the inner city Kingston neighbourhood of Trench Town.

Home to the late reggae superstar Bob Marley, Trench Town is rich in potential for community tourism, and Lindo was trying to help prepare community members to participate.

What she found among the mostly female participants surprised her.

“When I began training, I realised that there was no response. Just nothing. I realised that they wanted to talk, these women wanted to talk, they said no one had given them the opportunity to talk about who are they, what are they doing, so I stopped the training,” Lindo told IPS.

“We did one week of talkingàabout the trauma they had been living in, from the late seventies, with the beginning of political unrest, the division of their community, loss of lives of the elderly, rape, colour and how it divides them as women, the fear that they carry for their daughters,” says Lindo.

“And the most horrifying thing that we discovered, we took out a group of 15 women and (most) of them had experienced rape,” she said.

The one-week workshop proved cathartic, and helped lay the groundwork for another three months of community work that followed.

“It was amazing. After women were able to talk and cleanse themselves of what it is that was holding them back, they saw that they could go across and talk to some of their brothers on the other side,” Griffiths said. Some women, she said, went on to start small businesses.

But Griffiths readily admits that the progress which was made rests on a delicate foundation, and agrees with Lindo that such a project should ideally last for about 18 months to two years.

“It’s fragile. If you don’t have support to continue the process àit’ll break down very quickly,” Griffiths said.

But she and Lindo believe that that week of talking in Trench Town is a prototype for what can happen in other communities through a simple process.

“We’re sold on this concept of one woman talking. If we can get one woman to talk to another woman, and to continue this kind of sharing and dialogue, then it will break down a lot of the barriers which have been built up, a lot of the mistrust,” Griffiths said.

And it is this type of community work which must come first, she says.

“I want things to animate and work on the ground, and if it fits into a policy then that is fine. Because if you make the policy the focus, then you’re losing what you’re trying to do on the ground,” Griffiths said.

“It must fit in to it, rather than you trying to adapt what is happening to a policy. We’re doing it backwards. It would be good if people can say what they want, but when a lot of people say what they want, it doesn’t sound sellable, and therein lies the problem.”

“There are eight streams of the MDGs, so it’s a matter of where in these eight streams your (community) programme fits, and there’s a scramble right now, a lot of people are not articulate and drawing down a lot of resources, so their programmes don’t get profiled,” Griffiths told IPS.

“But a lot of small things are germinating on the ground and could lead to wider impact, but it takes times and a lot of (funding is) not long-term.”

The government says it recognises the importance of the work done by NGOs and provides support for gender equity work.

Faith Webster, executive director of the government’s Bureau of Women’s Affairs, says that stronger partnerships will have to be forged with community groups.

“I feel that more will have to be done working in partnership with NGOs and faith-based organisations to reach people at the ground level, and advocate for them, to give them a voice, to hear what they’re saying” she told IPS.

In developing a national gender policy, for example, she says the government is being careful to hold consultations with community groups across the island in a series of fora.

The gender policy is one of the strategies the government is using to achieve the MDGs, which include universal primary education and cutting poverty and hunger in half by 2015.

A progress report done by independent consultants for the government found that Jamaica had made “steady progress in the social and economic advancement of women”, but points out areas in which gender inequality remains.

“Gender inequality issues persist in certain areas, some of which include a reversal of the customary position in which females are at a disadvantageàthese issues include female unemployment rates being twice that of males while male educational achievement falls below that of females. Female empowerment at the household level is also an area requiring redress,” the report says.

The ratios of girls to boys at the primary school level stood at 0.96 in 2001, for instance, moving to 1.03 at the secondary level and 1.99 at the tertiary level. Jamaican women also have greater levels of literacy, but critically, continue to lag behind in socioeconomic indicators, with unemployment rates in 2002 recorded as 20.7 percent, twice that of men.

To address the problem, the government has established poverty alleviation programmes, and a national health fund to help underwrite medication for common chronic diseases.

In the area of gender equity specifically, the government has also undertaken legislative reform, reviewing 42 pieces of legislation, including such matters as giving women rights to the matrimonial home, and making sexual offences gender sensitive.

A National Gender Advisory Committee has been set up to help mainstream gender activities.

Poverty, crime, academic under-performance of boys, and HIV/AIDS are some of the areas in which Webster says there will have now to be increased focus.

The issue of gender-based violence, so evident in the Trench Town project, is one that she says is particularly important.

“We have been giving a lot of attention to gender-based violence, sexual and domestic abuse, we have been (educating) the public on what domestic and gender violence is, but a lot more work needs to be done in that area,” Webster says.

For community workers Shirley Lindo and Carmen Griffiths, any programme to help women must involve giving them a verbal space.

“Whatever we hope to do, the core of the effort (must be) to allow the women to talk, because the women in Jamaica are silent, and we carry the pain of what is happening to us in our homes, in our community,” Lindo asserts.