Sundari Ravindran

The much awaited NGO Forum and the UN World Conference to mark the end of the Women's Decade, have come and gone. You would never have guessed from the newspapers and magazines that it was an unprecedented encounter of more than 14,000 women belonging to many different countries, races, ethnic groups and classes. Most of them were participants at the informal NGO Forum which any woman could attend, but some managed to attend the "official" UN Conference - an intergovernmental one, which overlapped the Forum for a week. The NGO Forum, with over 1000 workshops on many varied topics based on the themes Equality, Development and Peace, was an experience too intense and rich to be adequately captured in words. It was seen differently and meant different things to different people. What we give below, therefore, is just one version of what happened at Nairobi.

At the Forum Isis International ran a number of workshops; "Development, Empowerment and Solidarity" was the theme of a series of four organized together with ICDA, The American Friends Service Committee and GABRIELA, Philippines. Others were on "Audiovisuals, Participation and Development" and the Latin American and Caribbean Women's Health Network. Brief reports and an account of the calls for action and information about resources and groups that emerged from these workshops appear later in this issue.

What, in our view, have been some of the achievements of Forum '85?

We believe that the Forum at Nairobi has established beyond all doubt that the women's movement is at this point in time truly "global" in character and not "white-western" as some claim and would like to believe. All of us from the Third World felt that the agenda truly reflected our priorities and many of the discussions were very relevant to Third World problems. It was very clear also, from the very beginning, that there was a broad consensus amongst most of us that there were no separate "women's issues", non-threatening to the status-quo and apolitical, but that all issues of oppression and exploitation concerned women and were therefore our issues. Thus it was that we concerned ourselves with war and peace, with racial and ethnic conflict, with the Debt crisis, with inequalities between and within countries; and were not merely content with waxing eloquence and congratulating each other on how well informed we were about all these but were intimately and emotionally involved, and angered and looked for ways in which "something could be done."