Women in Action 1991-1 From Rome to Manila: Strengthening Networking and South-South Dialogues

April 8,1991

Dear Friends,

We are very pleased and also very proud to be writing this letter for the first issue of Women in Action to be published out of our new office in Manila. Our plans and ideas for taking Isis International to Asia are finally becoming a reality.

The transfer from Rome to Manila reminds us of our move to Santiago. In 1984, two women who had been working at Isis in Rome returned to Santiago to open our center in Latin America. One of our first activities was the publication of Women in Action in Spanish.

We saw the opening of the Santiago office as the beginning of a process of decentralization through which we would have more direct contact with the many women and groups in the region who would become more involved in our programs and networking activities. By giving Latin American and Carib)bean women access to needed information from other regions of the world, we are meeting our objective of promoting South-South communication and North-South linkage and solidarity.

Because the Santiago office proved to be a great success in this respect, we decided to go a step further and open an office in Asia.

With our offices in Santiago and Manila, we envision our work reaching out as busy fax machines receive many requests for information, hundreds of letters cross the oceans, and our resource centers grow with the materials sent by women and groups from Asia, Africa and Latin America; women linking up, collaborating, coordinating, learning from the differences and similarities of our analyses, organization and actions. There is much we can learn from each other and much we can achieve by coming together to develop appropriate analyses and strategies that will help break the isolation between women's groups at the international level, strengthening our movement and bringing about change.

In Santiago, we have very exciting plans for 1991. The first publication in the Women's Book Series this year will be on Women and Human Rights. This book will cover the discussion taking place within the women's movement that advocates viewing women's rights as human rights.

Big changes are also in store for the Spanish edition of Women in Action, which is being redesigned as an international women's magazine in response to the development and growth of the women's movement in Spanish-speaking countries and its new needs in terms of information.

Another major activity in Santiago will be the organization of the regional work meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Women's Health Network in October, which will be reviewing and planning strategies for developing the women's health movement in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Last but not least, we will be publishing another edition of our bilingual Women's Data Base, providing an ever-growing number of interested groups and organizations with access to relevant information in our bibliographic data base that will help them in developing their organization, programs and activities.

We invite all of you to participate actively, and communicate often with us. We want to hear about your activities, experiences, analyses, and above all, we want to receive your opinions about our work.

All of us in the Santiago office of Isis International send you our best wishes, confident that the new Manila office will revitalize our work and release new energy for strengthening and expanding our activities, bringing us closer to the {people and share our resources.

Isis International
Santiago, Chile