Asia

Representing over half of the world's population, women are crucial, but still often overlooked representatives of their families, communities, and cultures in achieving a fully informed, engaged, and democratic electorate. With a number of upcoming national and municipal elections taking place around the world, we hope to continue to celebrate and build upon recent breakthroughs, ranging from the record percentage of women now serving in Rwanda's parliament to the 2009 election of four women into the parliament of Kuwait--the first women to accomplish this.

On April 10-11 in Jakarta, Indonesia, WLP held its 2010 Transnational Partners Convening (TPC) with partners from Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, prior to the World Movement for Democracy's Sixth Assembly. WLP partners shared strategies for enhancing the Partnership's work in political participation, ending violence against women, our peer-to-peer mentoring and exchange program, and advocacy campaigns, in light of challenges such as increasing extremism, restrictive NGO laws, and a challenging funding landscape.

WLP organizes a series of panels including "Inclusive Democracy: Women and Men Working Together to Ensure the Promises of Democracy", "Towards 2020: Strategies for Realizing Democracy", technology training sessions and the fourth convening of the International Women's Democracy Network.

Anna Pinto is a representative for an Indigenous people's organization based in the Indian state of Manipur called the Centre for Organization, Research and Education. She came to the UN conference to advocate for her people, and other peoples in her region, concerning the processes that are being developed to address climate change. Climate change and its extreme weather manifestations are not an abstract notion for Pinto. For the past two years her region has experienced multiple floods on a massive scale. "When I say floods, I'm talking about floods that displace 15 million, 6 million, 4 million people at a time. The lowest figure that a flood has displaced is 4 million and that 4 million has been displaced 4 times in a year."