By Madhav Karki, IUCN CEM Vice Chair & Asia Focal Point, on 08 March 2022.
At the outset, I wish all our women colleagues a Very Happy, Discrimination and Violence Free, Active and Rewarding International Women’s Day, 2022.
The theme of the IWD, 2022 is #BreakTheBias; The Day is to be celebrated as a Campaign to run for a year calling for Gender Equality and Zero Discrimination based on gender and stereotypes. Women’s Day also reminds us that we need to work for greater workplace Diversity, Equity, Justice and Inclusiveness. Once we achieve diversity at the workplace and in community organizations, we should celebrate the success collectively, giving credit to all, including men. By working together at an ecosystem scale and even better at the landscape level, we can achieve women’s equality as well as equity in natural resources management. This way, by working together collectively, we #BreakTheBias. CEM’s latest tools Nature based Solutions (NbS), strives to achieve greater equity and justice to women users and custodians of Nature.
In CEM, we try very hard to achieve gender, regional and disciplinary balance. IUCN and the CEM are very gender-sensitive and gender-balanced organizations. Commission on Ecosystem Management (CEM) also is very culture-sensitive as we have a multicultural work environment. We are an ecosystem team working for ecosystem people. We are inclusive not only in human resources management but also in knowledge and practice management. The indigenous and local knowledge, including traditional ecological knowledge, is highly valued by us. We believe that the diverse knowledge systems only can help us address current societal, environmental and global challenges with greater social and gender equality and equity.
Based on the CEM South Asia Webinar to celebrate the IWD, 2022, I suggest the following key messages to make the theme of the IWD 2022 a reality:
- Involvement/Engagement, not participation or representation of women, is critical; women need to be given the opportunity to voice out since their voice is critical to protect critical habitats and to make the agro-forest products value chains increase the value for everyone to share equitably. Women do not need mere presence but deserve leadership in the NRM sector; women face many constraints in their quest for equality, but they also have the opportunity to explore and harness;
- Women have more traditional ecological and agricultural knowledge that needs to be documented, recognized and utilized. In fact, women’s agroecological knowledge is better than men’s knowledge; their skill and knowledge can contribute more in conserving critical habitats and also making the food systems more healthy, inclusive and resilient;
- Often, women in our society have to shoulder double the burden, but women are resilient adaptive and can play a major role in transformative conservation. The responsibility of society is to properly harness this knowledge, skill and capacity;
- Women’s share in workforce is still less than 25%, although a much larger percentage of girls attend school and colleges. We, therefore, need to make the workplace more diverse, more women-friendly and enabling with women-specific facilities created;
- Women should be given more opportunities by breaking traditional barriers. we need to create an inclusive professional community by empowering women in the forestry value chain, inclusive access and equitable benefit sharing; this will require more women actively and meaningfully participating in agro-forest value chain analysis, development and management; the aim should be to increase the value of the production to consumption chain and make the sharing of the collective increase in an inclusive and equitable manner;
- Finally, awareness-raising of all stakeholders, especially policy and decision-makers, inclusive community mobilization, capacity building/training, economic empowerment and leadership building are critical for achieving active and meaningful participation of women in Nature Conservation.