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You have achieved great success in being accepted as a ‘young leader.’ How
did you begin this journey?
I haven’t really come to comfortable terms with my being a ‘young leader.’
Whenever I get called such, I often can not
help but silently think, ‘I am?!’ – in reaction to both the ‘leader’ and ‘young’
parts of the tag. My discomfort with the ‘leader’ part may well be because I
could not help but ask what I have done or if I have done enough to be worthy of
the distinction. As for the ‘young’ part, I think my discomfort comes from my
having started out as a women’s rights activist and not having identified as
‘young’ until I became a youth activist through my membership in the Network of
Asia Pacific Youth (NAPY). Before NAPY, the identities I owned were that of
being a woman, a lesbian, a feminist activist from the Global South, a Filipino,
an agnostic and probably a few more. ‘Young’ never figured in it. Also
‘youngness’ is subjective. I am 29 years old right now and 29 may be young
relative to 35, 40, or 50 and above but relative to 25 and lower, I think not.
But if I were to just graciously accept the tag, I could say that my activist
journey began with the women’s movement in the Philippines through work in a
women’s health and rights organisation called ISSA. I’m a product of an activist
(one can even say left-leaning) university, came from a very non-traditional
family and have since early on held non mainstream-aligned ideologies but I was
not really so political in college. It was my exposure to the Philippine women’s
movement that surfaced the feminist and the activist in me. Now, I cannot
imagine doing anything else but work for the advancement of women’s rights.
Tell us about your work with NAPY. How do you go about advocacy work with
young people and making a claim for their rights?
I am one of the coordinators of NAPY, a regional organisation which works
towards advancing young people’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR)
and ensuring meaningful participation of young people toward advancing and
continuously pushing discussion and critical thinking about young people’s
rights. For example, we used to say that youth is a basis for exclusion in
decision-making processes and it used to be that we stopped our discussions at
that. But now because of what our experience tells us, we say that in some cases
youth could actually be an identity of privilege—a lot of funding goes toward
youth issues and to some extent youth participation, in regional and
international events there are usually slots guaranteed for young people, etc.
Now what we question is the quality of that youth participation or the intent
behind the participation. We do the same envelopepushing discussions around
young people’s sexual rights, reproductive rights and so on.
Do you see any improvement and acknowledgement of the sexual and reproductive
rights of young people in the region? What more needs to be done?
Definitely there have been changes, but as clichéd as I am afraid this sounds,
the changes are far from enough to make young people’s SRHR situation in this
region ideal. Youth SRHR thinking at the regional level – in the UN, among
donor agencies and regional NGOs and NGO coalitions – has progressed although it
could still do with a lot more advancements. However, at the local and national levels, at the level of service
providers and policy makers, in
the homes and schools or communities of young people, among young people
themselves, the situation has either
stagnated or worsened. In a number of countries we hear of sexuality education
being banned, of age of marriage
being lowered to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ of unmarried sex; unmarried and young
women and men continue to lack
access to comprehensive, safe, non-judgmental and highquality SRHR services;
pregnant girls still get kicked out
of schools (if they are lucky to be attending school at all); the list of sob
situations goes on.
There are a lot of things that need to be done and I would not even attempt to
start listing them here, there is a lot of
good literature on that already. What is worth mentioning though is that I think
a needed first step is changing people’s attitudes and constructs about
sexuality – sexuality has to be demystified, people (especially decision-makers)
need to be comfortable with sexuality and sex, notions about sex and sexuality need
to be recast.
How long have you been with ARROW? What political ideologies guide ARROW’s
work in the region?
I have been part of ARROW’s staff team only since 2007 but have known ARROW
since 2000, through my local
organisation which was an ARROW partner, and then through NAPY. I’ve attended
ARROW meetings as a
partner, had an internship with the organisation in 2004/05 and have served in
its Programme Advisory Committee.
It has been and remains to be an interesting and fulfilling journey.
ARROW is a feminist regional organisation committed to promoting and protecting
women’s health, rights and
needs, particularly in the area of women’s sexuality and reproductive health. It
believes that good health and wellbeing
and access to comprehensive and affordable gendersensitive health services are
fundamental human rights.
ARROW believes in and supports local, national and regional partnerships for the
advancement of SRHR. It
also believes in information and resource-sharing and in evidence-based and
grassroots reality-based SRHR
advocacy.
What are the specific programmes and activities you carry out to reach out to
women? Which
countries do you operate in?
ARROW currently uses five interrelated strategies aimed at reorienting SRHR and
related policies and programmes
to make them women-friendly, strengthening the women’s movement and civil
society for policy advocacy and
improving women’s sexual and reproductive health and lives: (1) the INFOCOM
strategy which aims to provide
useful, cutting edge, critical and pro-active information to key SRHR
stakeholders, (2) Evidence-based research,
monitoring and advocacy on the women’s SRHR in the region, (3) Capacity building
among ARROW partner
organisations for SRHR policy advocacy, (4) Advocacy partnership development
among SRHR organisations
across and within localities, countries and sub regions in Asia Pacific and (5)
Documentation and sharing of good SRHR NGO practices.
ARROW is also proud of a strategy it has initiated called the Women’s Health and
Rights Advocacy Partnership or (WHRAP). WHRAP is part of the vision shared by ARROW and its partners to move
forward the sexual and
reproductive health and rights agenda through advocacy partnerships across the
region. WHRAP brings together women NGO partners who are committed to advancing women’s SRHR and serves as a
platform for supporting joint strategic planning and advocacy among these groups. WHRAP is currently
implemented in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and China and ARROW is embarking on expanding WHRAP,
intertwined with an ICPD (International Conference on Population and Development) 15 Monitoring Project to a total of 13
Asia Pacific countries in 2008.
How do you incorporate the ‘sexual’ component in reproductive health and
rights issues?
ARROW has been reflecting on and recognised its own need to give more attention
to the sexuality component of its work as an SRHR NGO. So far we have been
trying to incorporate positive sexuality affirming frameworks in our
publications, partnership initiatives and advocacy interventions. We are working
towards a more programmatic approach to doing this and hopefully, partnerships
and engagements with organisations like yours working on sexuality issues would
strengthen our efforts.
What are the challenges and tensions you face in your work? How do you meet
them?
The work itself – meeting deliverables, multi-tasking, making sure what you are
doing is relevant, reminding yourself to ground your work to the organisation’s
bigger and ultimate goals is of course a challenge. For someone ‘young’, I guess
another implicit (imagined or real) challenge is proving that you are good/good
enough for what was entrusted you. Loving what you do, accepting that challenges
are all part of a day’s work, knowing that what you are doing is more than work
to you and keeping in sight the purpose of what you do usually helps.
How easy/difficult has it been for you personally to do all the things that
you do? What are your sources of support?
So far I have found great fulfillment in what I have chosen to do. There were a
number of disillusionments along the way but one learns to love, live and deal
with both the flaws and beauties of the women’s movement.
I also think the kind of family and friends that I have has made it relatively
easy for me to be a feminist activist and to do SRHR work. Not that my family is
political but they are not conservative or fundamentalists which Filipino
families/parents could easily be. I am also lucky that even when I was younger
I’ve enjoyed a great degree of freedom to do what I want to do and believe in
what I want to which I’ve realised is not the situation of other friends in the
movement. What also makes the work more rewarding is that I consider the field I
am in as my community; most of my close friends and my new family (me and my
partner) are part of it.
What kind of changes would you like to see happening in the world in the next
five years?
This sounds like a beauty pageant question and I’m contemplating answering
‘World Peace!’ but would refrain from that. In five years, or at least in my
lifetime, I want to see:
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a recasting of power in this world so that it is enjoyed equally by women and
men as well as people of diverse sexualities
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economic wealth and political power redistributed among nations and
individuals
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discrimination on any basis eliminated
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people enjoying healthy sexualities, whatever that is for them. I think this
would make the world a definitely
happier place
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and, yes, world peace!
Nothing much really. Just how things should be.
RD is a researcher, psychologist and social scientist by academic
training and feminist activist by choice. She is currently Programme Manager
for Advocacy and Capacity Building at ARROW and soon-to-age-out
co-coordinator of the Network of Asia Pacific Youth (NAPY). She loves what
she does, but if only she had the skills, she wouldn’t have minded being a
poet, painter, guitarist or song writer.
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