by Annie Paul
Kingston, March 29 (WFS/IPS) - Mary is an African woman whose husband is unemployed. She ekes out a living by selling vegetables the whole day in a market which lacks even sanitary conveniences.
Leela is an Asian woman who chops mangoes at a pickle factory ten hours a day, and then comes home with barely enough to feed her family.
Yvonne is from the Caribbean and she makes pillows which her five children try to sell on the streets for her.
Jane has different problems: she is a single woman from North America who yearns to own a house. But her salary as a waitress makes this an impossible dream.
What do these women have in common? They all earn low incomes and lead precarious lives and none of them subscribe to any feminist magazines. They are "grassroots" women.
When the United Nations Decade for Women conference was held in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985, grassroots women
were conspicuously under-represented. Some of the women activists who participated in this conference, pressed for the establishment of a network that would focus mainly on the development of grassroots women world-wide.
Four years later. Grassroots Women Organising Ourselves Together (GROOTS), has just completed its first planning meeting here.
Some of the women from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, West Asia, North America and the Pacific, who participated in the meeting, were nominated to a committee by an international task force, facilitated by a US group called "Neighbourhood Women".
Some of the committee members are grassroots women, while others are involved in organising and training grassroots women, in their own countries. The task force felt that it was essential to represent both the developed and the developing world on the committee, in order to get an overview of the working women's movements at various stages of development.
A major aim of the Kingston meeting was to create a framework for GROOTS, within which to achieve its threefold purpose: of enabling women to solve their own problems and participate in community development, of making global cross-fertilisation of ideas possible by providing a medium for sharing experiences and successes, and of focussing international attention on the capabilities and needs of low-income women.
Caroline Pezzullo, the Chairwoman of the task force, explained, "GROOTS was conceived as a network with everybody participating equally, sharing each other's experiences and learning from them". She felt that in creating the framework, it was important to avoid male hierarchical structures.
The meeting also acted as a forum for an exchange of experiences in the field of development. Honoree Mouyema, a representative of Cameroon, described one of the projects of her organisation, the Cameroon Women's Network Association (CAWNA).
Rural women who sell their produce in the capital city of Yaounde are often left with a large unsold stock at the end of the day. They are unable to return to their homes in the countryside, and end up spending the night at the marketplace which has neither sleeping quarters nor toilets.
CAWNA is trying to establish a cooperative which will not only buy the unsold stock, but also will process and resell it to the city's working women who cannot shop earlier in the day.
"This is a very viable process which will benefit both rural as well as urban women", observed Mouyema.
In India, there is a different kind of problem. Moneylenders and middlemen supply women with credit for business and raw materials at exorbitant interest rates.
An Indian representative at the meeting, Jaya Arunachalam, recounted the efforts made by her organisation, the Working Women's Forum (WWF), to find a way out of this exploitative system.
Initally the WWF acted as an intermediary between women and nationalised Indian banks which offer low interest rates. Soon, however, the number of borrowers grew large and unwieldy. In 1981, the WWF established its own cooperatives society and an informal banking process with its own credit system.
One of the issues raised at the Kingston meeting was the role of the developed countries in the plight of developing nations.
"The debt crisis affecting most Third World countries makes it impossible for a nation's economy to recover, and this eventually has an impact on women workers", commented Arunachalam.
However, none of these problems were seen as irreconcilable. The GROOTS women acknowledged them, but moved on to the real agenda: actualising their many visions.
Apart from building and operating pilot communities with an infrastructure that will provide the grassroots women with basic facilities like housing, child care and education, the GROOTS women also want to pressurise governments into incorporating women's real needs into their development planning.
The other aims of GROOTS include education of grassroots women to enable them to speak up for themselves, help in discovering new means of generating incomes, and information on the various sources for this that are available to them.
Jan Peterson, Director of the National Congress of Neighbourhood Women, maintains that GROOTS will not operate in isolation from other women's networks. "It's just that the relationship needs to be re-shapcd. GROOTS is about transforming relationships be
tween grassroots women and professional women", she claims.
Generally grassroots women know all about middle and upper class women because they work for them. But the reverse is not true. Recognising the mu tual need between these two sections, GROOTS hopes to change this.
GROOTS has adopted a two-year planning phase, in the course of which the group will meet in March 1990 at Madras in South India, under the auspices of the WWF. Meanwhile, a newsletter will keep the women in touch.
In order to support and exchange local strategies, GROOTS aims to include representatives from the socialist bloc countries, Arab countries, Israel and South Africa. This will amply demonstrate that women can work together despite political, religious and economic differences.
"The one thing GROOTS is not afraid of, is confrontation", states Peterson.
Source: Women's Feature Service March-April 1989, WFS do Interpress Service, Via Panispema 207, 00184 Rome, Italy
