International Women’s Day

Saturday the 8^th of March is International Women’s Day. It would be really nice if such a day could pass unremarked because there was nothing remarkable to think or talk about regarding gender equality. Maybe some year. 2025 is not that year.

There is such a lot that could be talked about, unfortunately. I’m not going to talk about the reduction in healthcare affecting women in the USA, only likely to ramp up in the wake of Trump’s re-election or the cuts to women’s health and education programmes that were funded by USAID. I’m not going to talk about the representation of women on executive boards of top companies in the UK. Instead, I’m going to talk about what we did, here in Nepal, to mark the day.

We celebrated a little early. On Wednesday the 5^th we ran an event on base in the evening. That Wednesday was a mason’s night, which is when the female masons, male masons, school representatives, community members come and join us for dinner and some Nepali dancing after dinner. So before dinner, at 5pm, we had an International Women’s Day discussion.

I worked really closely with our community coordinator when planning the session and he helped me deliver it too. I absolutely couldn’t have done it without him. It was a fabulous team effort. Our aim was to talk about some of the issues around gender inequality that occur here, in this community. We also wanted to do it in about an hour. And in two languages. Amongst our participants were native English speakers, native Nepali speakers and people for whom English is an additional language. Amongst our participants were people with post-graduate degrees in gender studies as well as people who had not completed secondary school. So, not a trivial task, but definitely worth the effort and the planning.

The community we are living and working in is a rich, vibrant, skilled community, however, the education here is not as good as it could be and the economic wellbeing is not as good as it could be and these two things have an impact on the community generally and women specifically. And this was the context for our discussion.

We divided participants into several groups. Each group was either Nepali speaking or English speaking. While I would have loved to mix those groups up, it would have made the discussions much more difficult. Each group had a large sheet of paper and some coloured pens.

We began by asking each group to jot down some of the problems that people in the community face due to low-economic wellbeing and lack of education. Each group shared a few of their ideas with the wider group. Everything that was said was translated into the other language. We then asked each group to circle the things on their list that affect only women or that affect women more than men. We then asked for some suggestions of things that could be done to make things better (programmes they already knew about, government interventions, etc, etc). We then talked about some of the things All Hands and Hearts does here – Relief Nepal is our partner organisation that runs some training: disaster resilience; child rights; menstrual health and our female mason trainee programme. We heard from our Project Manager as she talked a bit about her experiences as a woman in construction.

Some of the issues that were discussed were really obvious – increasing economic opportunities is a great way to help but could benefit from government intervention; training and skill development is always welcome. We discussed witch hunts (not common but not unheard of here in Nepal); human trafficking (quite common in this area); child marriage (there are signs on the sides of the road reminding people that this is illegal). We talked about dowry, healthcare, worker’s rights, menstrual health education, social care networks. We talked about education and taboos and superstitions.

The discussions were interesting and thought provoking. Some people learned some new things.

Maybe one day we won’t need to take time to discuss gender equality across such a broad range of issues. But in the meantime, I’m glad to be living and working with some remarkable and inspirational women and to be surrounded by men who are supportive allies. Change is happening and if we continue to work together the change will continue too!