European Forum

Women can do it project

Original set-up, May 1998

Introduction

In the whole CEE region, women need to be encouraged to enter in politics and to learn new political skills. They need it to be able to be successful in the conditions of a very much male centered parliamentarian democracy, born out of the big political changes in this part of Europe at the beginning of 90.

Norway is one of the countries with the world best results of building gender balanced democracy. Norwegians have nearly 40% of women in the parliament, they had recently the government with a woman prime minister and more than a half of women ministers. This success was built on decades of efforts of the Norwegian women\'s movement, specially of the Norwegian Labor Party Women\'s organization. The experiences and know how of the women from Norway, are precious sources of knowledge and inspiration for the women in the whole world, specially in the CEE region where women are restarting their fight for equal opportunities in politics almost from the scratches.

The Norwegian booklet \"Women can do it\" \" served as a very successful material of training for generations of Norwegian women politicians. Women\'s political culture in the so called socialistic era was built on the ideological pattern of the predominance of the class over gender, state over individual, one party over state and civil society. The women of this region started to discover the possible impact and power of the grass roots women\'s movement and the specific role of the women in politics only recently. And there was no homemade handle books or other materials to be used in the process of their growing need for the capacity building. So they discovered the booklets, born in the women movement of Sweden ( Power Booklet) and Norway (Women can do it).

In the first half of nineties the booklet \"Women can do it\" was translated in Russian, Polish, Czech and Latvian and successful national training courses were organized in these countries with the help of Norwegian government and Labor Party Women organization.
CEE Network for Gender Issues has well developed cooperation with a number of progressive partisan and non-partisan women\'s groups in nearly all the countries of the CEE region and a professional executive director able to coordinate the project.
These are the reasons why CEE Network for Gender Issues started, in co-operation with Norwegian government and Norwegian Labor Party Women, the \"Women can do it\" project.

The main goals

• to encourage women to take active part in public life and in politics
• to enable women from different political parties, NGO-s and trade unions to learn political skills together
• to encourage women from different political backgrounds and social experiences to start joint projects of political empowerment of women in their countries.

Short description of the project:

our project will be developed in three steps:

• Translation and printing of at least 100 copies of the booklet \"Women can do it\" per language/or nation in languages of the nations of the CEE region: Slovene, Serbian (in Latin alphabet), Macedonian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Slovak, Hungarian, Belarus, Ukrainian, Estonian and Lithuanian.
• Four sub-regional training of the trainers courses to prepare the groups of coordinators of the national training courses: CE sub-region; South-east sub-region; Baltic, Ukraine and Belarus sub-region; former south-east Yugoslavia sub-region.
• In the sub-regional courses the participants will be led through all the 12 chapters of the booklet and Norwegian experts will explain to them how to organize and how to run national courses in their countries. The participants - three of them from each country in the sub-region - will be the best women activists from different political parties, women NGO and trade unions.
• National training courses. Every national group of women who will attend the sub-regional course will have a task to organize a national training for the women in their country.
  
  Duration of the project: at least two years
  
  Main project locations: for the sub-regional training of the trainer courses:
• Hungary
• Macedonia
• Croatia
• Estonia or Lithuania

National courses will be in every nation where trained women\'s group will be capable of founding and organizing them.

Partners already working on the project (on translations and on the sub-regional seminars) in the CEE region:

• Liberal Democratic Party Women Net and Governmental Office for Women politics- Slovenia. The booklet will be used by at least 20 women groups - NGO, partisan factions and trade union women groups.
• Women\'s Forum UBSD - Bosnia and Herzegovina. Translation in Serbian language and Latin alphabet will be used by all progressive women NGO in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Federative Republic of Yugoslavia - Serbia, Vojvodina and Monte Negro and in Croatia.
• Union of Women Organization of the Republic of Macedonia - Macedonia. The translation in Macedonian will be used by 35 Macedonian NGO women groups.
• Union of the Albanian Women of the Republic of Macedonia: The translation in Albanian language will serve for Albanian women NGO in Kosova, Macedonia and Albania.
• Romanian Forum of Social Democrat Women - Romania. The translation will be used by this organization and other Romanian women NGO and women\'s groups in Trade Unions, and for all women\'s groups in Moldova.
• HSDP - Hungary. The translation will be used in this party, in HSP, in Hungarian Women\'s Association and Hungarian Women\'s Academy.
• Slovak Women\'s Social Democracy Community - Slovakia - the translation will be used for all progressive women\'s groups in Slovakia.
• Women\'s organization of Moderates - Estonia.
• Lithuanian Women\'s Consultative Center - translation in Lithuanian will be used for all women\'s groups in Lithuania.