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	Women leading the way by Slum Dwellers International (SDI)   Each day groups of women in slum neighbourhoods and settlements walk from home to home, and gather small change from each other in order to collectively address the livelihood struggles they share.   Through daily interactions, and weekly community gatherings, savings group members articulate what problems exist within their community, creating a sense of shared identity for the women of urban poor communities.   Whilst SDI does not exclude men, the reality is that the savings groups are comprised mainly of women.   Women are often at the center of the household – responsible for the provision of food, school fees, clean water, and a place to sleep. By targeting the poorest women in a settlement, one can be sure that the settlement’s most vital needs will be addressed.   Additionally, the structure of savings groups allows members to access short-term loans, which are otherwise largely unavailable to the urban poor.   This system of savings & credit prepares communities for medium and large-scale financial management necessary in the slum upgrading projects they pursue. Often regarded as the cornerstone of SDI, these savings groups link together to form “federations.”   Central Participation of Women   For SDI, the central participation of women is not just an ideal but a critical component of a gender-sensitive mobilization strategy, which sees men and women re-negotiating their relationships within families, communities, and organizational forms such as slum dweller “federations”.   By prioritizing the leadership potential of women, federations alter traditional male domination in communities, in ways that actually strengthen grassroots leadership.   Recognising that women are often the true engines of development, SDI uses the savings and credit model to develop their leadership capacity, financial management skills, and confidence.   By entrusting women to handle such important monetary systems, whereby they are in charge of the precious savings of their neighbours and friends, communities begin to understand the potential of women as public decision-makers and powerful agents of change.   In fact, savings and credit activities, apart from their clear financial benefits, serve as a means to bring women out of the home and into the public sphere in a manner that men rarely resent.   Community planning activities build political capital for communities both internally and externally. Within communities, activities like enumeration (household-to-household socio-economic surveys) and mapping create space for communities to: identify developmental priorities, organize leadership, expose and mediate grievances between segments of the community, and cohere around future planning.   Such activities serve as a platform for engagement with governments and other stakeholders involved in planning and setting policy for development in urban centres.   A key aspect of community planning activities is that communities own the information they collect. When they share the data with government, they are able to create new relationships — and even institutions — that make the poor integral role players in the decisions that affect their lives.   Partnerships   SDI federations cannot address informal settlement challenges on their own, but they can catalyse change. The key to reaching community driven development at scale is the inclusion of external partners. SDI engages with governments, international organisations, academia and other institutions wherever possible to create relationships that benefit the urban poor.   By opening space for slum dwellers to engage in international advocacy at the global level, and by drawing international partners into local processes through key local events, opportunities are created for key partnerships to develop that can impact at both the local and global level.   Ultimately, the aim is to create situations in which the urban poor are able to play a central role in “co-producing” access to land, services, and housing.   Slum Upgrading   There is not, and never will be, a one-size-fits-all approach to upgrading of informal settlements. Each settlement is unique in its challenges, but there are common themes.   Informal settlement upgrading is not simply “site and service” or the provision of a “top structure” house. Upgrading is any intervention that improves the physical conditions of a settlement, which in turn enhances the lives of its inhabitants.   The most critical emphasis is that this process should happen in situ, where communities already exist. Relocations should always be as a last resort. However in situations in which they are unavoidable, such as in flood planes or along railway lines, the federations work to ensure that decisions are made in conjunction with the community.   SDI projects do not deliver land, services and incremental houses as ends in themselves, but do so as a means to draw in politicians and policy makers in order to challenge and transform institutional arrangements and policies. For SDI this is not only a matter of delivery but also one of deepening democracy.   Learning Exchanges   Horizontal learning exchange from one urban poor community to another is the primary learning strategy of SDI. Participants within the savings networks learn best from each other.   When one savings group has initiated a successful income-generating project, re-planned a settlement or built a toilet block, SDI enables groups to come together and learn from intra-network achievements.   The community exchange process builds upon the logic of ‘doing is knowing’ and helps to develop a collective vision.   As savers travel from Cape Town’s Sheffield Road to Kenya’s Mukuru Sinai to India’s Pune, the network is unified and strengthened.   Such learning happens not only at the street level but between towns, regions, provinces, and nations. In this way, locally appropriate ideas are transferred into the global dialogue on urban development through dialogue between slum dweller peers.   Additionally, horizontal exchanges create a platform for learning that builds alternative community-based politics and “expertise,” challenging the notion that development solutions must come from professionals.   In this way, communities begin to view themselves as holding the answers to their own problems rather than looking externally for professional help.   The pool of knowledge generated through exchange programs becomes a collective asset of the SDI network. When slum dwellers meet with external actors to debate development policies, they can draw from international examples, which influences government and other stakeholders to listen.   * SDI is a network of community-based organisations of the urban poor in 32 countries and hundreds of cities and towns across Africa, Asia and Latin America. In each country where SDI has a presence, affiliate organisations come together at the community, city and national level to form federations of the urban poor.   http://sdinet.org/our-practices-for-change/ http://sdinet.org/blog/ http://sdinet.org/2021/02/enhancing-the-resilience-of-slum-communities-to-overcome-the-covid-19-crisis/ http://www.icccad.net/tag/voices-from-the-frontline/ http://www.iied.org/tag/informal-settlements-slums http://www.citiesalliance.org/newsroom/news/urban-news/unthinking-tenure-integrating-slums-and-building-equality http://www.make-the-shift.org/advocacy-update-human-rights-groups-call-on-countries-to-implement-comprehensive-covid-19-housing-legislation/ http://unhousingrapp.org/why-housing http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Housing/Pages/callCovid19.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Housing/Pages/AnnualReports.aspx Visit the related web page
	Supporting women and their communities engaged in extractive struggles by Ford Foundation, agencies   Apr. 2023   Supporting women and their communities engaged in extractive struggles   Around the world, communities impacted by extractive industries—mining, drilling, logging—face multiple and intersecting forms of violence. That violence is gendered in its operation and in whom it benefits and harms.   Building Power in Crisis explores the breadth of structural violence created or reinforced by extractivism, from political violence against women environmental defenders to economic violence that threatens women’s livelihoods. Centering the experiences of women and girls in frontline communities, the report lifts up their strategies to resist extractive development and lead with bold and sustainable alternatives.   Based on nearly 100 interviews with women leaders and their allies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Building Power in Crisis provides an analysis of the opportunities for supporting women and their communities engaged in extractive struggles.   http://www.sagefundrights.org/women-and-extractivism   Examining extractivism’s gendered violence and honoring the women fighting for change, by Ximena Saskia Warnaars. (Ford Foundation)   15 years ago, in June 2006, local villagers in the Chiadzwa area of Eastern Zimbabwe’s Marange district discovered diamonds. A diamond rush ensued, and thousands flooded the fields, hoping to find fortune. In less than five months, the situation turned grave. As police took control of the fields, torturing, beating, harassing, arresting, imprisoning, and even killing those deemed to be illegal miners, the once peaceful Chiadzwa was radically transformed. Men and boys suffered significant abuse and torture, but gendered structural violence, which had always subjugated women and girls, was intensified and even institutionalized. Sexual assault and rape, for example, were purposefully weaponized to discourage illegal diamond mining, with hundreds of women affected.   This gendered violence was extreme but not exceptional. As an economic model, large-scale extractivism puts profit and growth over people and the planet. It drives inequality precisely because extractions are conducted under certain conditions and without the consent of the local people.   Whether it involves diamond mining in Chiadzwa or drilling, logging, or industrial agriculture in other parts of the Global South, extractivism disproportionately affects women and girls. Supported by the Ford Foundation, a new landscape analysis from The SAGE Fund—“Building Power in Crisis: Women’s Responses to Extractivism”—documents that in communities where gender discrimination is already the norm, rampant natural resource extraction and depletion results in women and girls having increased responsibilities and risks.   They are, for example, burdened with additional caretaking when men migrate for higher-paying jobs. They are forced to farm less fertile land that produces poor yields. Their movement is constrained by private security forces or government actors. They are targeted for speaking out against extractive projects. Their reproductive and respiratory health suffer. They are forced into exploitative sex work.   Bearing the greatest burden   “Everyone is at risk when they live in a community where extractivism happens,” explained Winnet Shamuyarira, the project coordinator at WoMin African Alliance, which works in more than a dozen African countries, spotlighting how extractivism exacerbates inequalities.   “But women are—and have always been—viewed as disposable. Extractivism was born out of colonialism, which wasn’t just about conquering land. It was also about taking control of women’s bodies, silencing them, and turning them into objects for male consumption. That context impacts everything.”   Over the past decade, WoMin’s research has shown, time and time again, that women carry the heaviest burden and experience extreme trauma when natural resources are taken from their land and exported on a massive scale.   “Extraction happens in deeply patriarchal cultures where there is tremendous inequality,” Shamuyarira said, explaining that corporate and government actors take full advantage of this oppression, utilizing already existing power dynamics to their benefit. That means excluding women from important decision-making processes and turning their bodies into battlegrounds. “We see situations where armed men with guns are given tremendous power. They do not negotiate. They tell you what to do, and if you want to survive, you do it.”   Exercising agency, formulating strategies   “Building Power in Crisis” highlights the critical intersection of environmental destruction, gender inequality, and civic engagement. In addition to documenting the drivers of extractivism and its disproportionate impact on women and girls, the report finds that there are devastating ripple effects when women and girls are denied control over land and natural resource management.   In most of the Global South, women farmers produce between 40-80% of food. They also collect and save seeds, play invaluable roles in forest conservation, and steward local water systems.   Extractivism disrupts all of these roles and relationships, but bold women leaders are fighting back, becoming agents of change—and building, transforming, and confronting power—even when their health, safety, and livelihoods are on the line.   “What’s really worked are the collective actions that women carry out on the ground,” said Joan Carling, global director of Indigenous People’s Rights International, which addresses and prevents criminalization, violence, and impunity against Indigenous peoples in six countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia.   “Women lie down on the roads and streets to prevent the bulldozers from coming in for mining….Communities on the ground are really standing up and have actually prevented many of these projects.”   Women are also building power in their communities by educating, organizing, and mobilizing marginalized groups who are traditionally excluded from decision-making processes. Power–building by women tends to be less top-down and more inclusive and informative.   “Women are the educators—the ones who share the information, give workshops, even if not formal, in meetings, organizing, weaving together,” said Fernanda Hopenhaym, executive director of Poder, which promotes corporate transparency and accountability in Latin American countries. “They’re the ones who are developing and strengthening the social fabric… they take advantage of these spaces to build.”   As women become environmental defenders, community conveners, and catalysts for change, they are defying the roles prescribed for them and challenging those benefiting from and spearheading extractive projects. This is nothing short of courageous, but it is also dangerous and often comes with consequences. Allies must step in and offer support. This assistance may initially look like triage.   “When we started thinking about solutions for women in Zimbabwe, we realized that we needed counselors to help them address their trauma—not just as individuals, but also collectively,” said Shamuyarira. “They needed to know that they didn’t do anything wrong. That they were the ones who were violated. And then, as we provided trauma support, we realized that wasn’t sufficient. Women needed practical solutions so they could feed their families and safe spaces so they could build their livelihoods.”   Women who have experienced and survived gendered violence also possess the most important information about how to keep themselves safe. Their systems of collective care have transformed how women receive support, removing the onus from individuals and placing it within a community.   It is possible to facilitate real development—to create women-led, collaborative, autonomous communities that build power for all.   http://www.fordfound.org/news-and-stories/stories/posts/examining-extractivism-s-gendered-violence-and-honoring-the-women-fighting-for-change/ Visit the related web page
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