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It’s Friday, and a group of young women sit excitedly around a conference table. They talk animatedly, laughing and playful as they relate the week’s events and share stories about work and life.
But the room soon turns quiet and serious as the meeting of the Young Women’s Leadership Programme (YWLP) network is called to order. Honey Sokry, chair of the network, pulls out the meeting’s agenda and discussions begin in earnest.
Since it was established in January 2007, the YWLP has met numerous times, growing from an initial grouping of 10 young women to 28 between the ages of 18 and 30, and each representing different NGOs based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city. The network began as an idea suggested by UNIFEM, and soon took on a life of its own.
Honey, a UNIFEM staff member, armed with a little seed funding from UNIFEM’s CEDAW SEAP programme, volunteered to coordinate a group of young women to meet regularly to share experiences, develop their professional skills, and work together on raising awareness about women’s rights issues in Cambodia. “As young women, we need to be more proactive in our country, and also help to promote gender,” she says, adding, “stereotypes make us very hesitant to speak up, but being in a group of women around the same age makes us more confident to take action.”
The women meet to discuss challenges at work, offer each other advice, and organize workshops to build their skills on issues such as leadership and negotiation. They are adamant however, that theirs is much more than just a self-help or personal development network – also on the agenda are issues such as combating violence against women, HIV/AIDS, trafficking, gender-role stereotyping and even disaster preparedness. CEDAW provides the group with a lens with which to view the situation of women in the country, and a framework within which to work together. They infuse their discussions with personal experiences gained from their daily jobs; and similarly, learning about CEDAW and women’s rights has also helped them to approach their work from a gender-perspective.
Hourn Ratana, a 22-year old who works on disaster preparedness at an environmental NGO said that when she was in school she learnt a little about women’s issues but “always wondered what the big deal was’, mainly because she came from a progressive-thinking family. “Once I joined the network and learned about CEDAW, I realized that the situation for many women in Cambodia is very different from my own, and is very discriminatory. Now, in my daily work, I question a lot more about the role of women, and the impact on women of different policies.”
The group’s plans for 2008 are ambitious – on the calendar is a workshop on CEDAW to deepen their knowledge of the Convention and its implementation; a project to monitor how women are depicted in the media; a public forum for Cambodian women thinking of becoming migrant workers; and a campaign to tackle ‘chbab srey’, the traditional code of conduct which determines how Cambodian men and women should behave in society.
According to Siek Bopha, 27, ‘chbab srey’ is possibly the biggest obstacle to progress for women in Cambodia. ‘As young women, we need to address this issue – women are not allowed to do so many things in our society, we are expected to just stay at home and cook and clean and look after the family. And ‘chbab srey’ is still taught to us in school, so it’s very difficult for us to escape from the stereotypes.” In 2008, the network intends to outline a strategy to raise awareness, especially among young people, about how ‘chbab srey’ sanctions discrimination against women, and runs contrary to CEDAW. Part of the strategy will include organizing public debates, and airing these on TV and radio.
The women are confident that their network is only going to get bigger and better. They say there are a lot of young women in Cambodia who want to know more and take action on women’s rights, but that there are still only a few opportunities open to do so. They hope that their network will be a good rallying point – “It’s about creating a community,” says Chor Sreymom, 24, who works for the Peace and Development Institute, “on our own we can’t know everything – the YWLP helps us to help each other.”
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