Title of Event:

Name of Organisation:

Date and time of the session:

Practices on Responsive Local Governance: Guidelines for Success in Partnering with Grassroots Organizations

The Huairou Commission

June 20th, 1:30 - 3:30pm

Key Highlights

1. Estimated no of participants: 75
2. Stakeholder group representation at the event: Grassroots Women and Partners (including donors, NGOs, researchers and policy makers)
3. What were the expected objectives: Outline successful practices of grassroots women in community development, their strategies for working with local government and outcomes resulting from partnership
4. What did the networking event achieve: Highlighted the win-win of community and local government partnership, demonstrated strategies and tools which have been employed by grassroots groups to engage local authorities, showed where and how stakeholders could play a role, and launched an initiative between The Huairou Commission and United Cities Local Governments which demonstrates partnerships between grassroots women leaders and local authorities on the regional and international level to work on community development, democratic participation of women and builds on the strengths of the growing constituencies of the two organizations.

2. What were the core issues identified in your event as they relate to the theme and sub-themes of WUFIII?

Sub-themes 1: Urban Planning and Management

Sub-theme 3: Social Inclusion and Participation

• Grassroots women working in their communities can take advantage of decentralization processes to open up public space and advocate for resource allocation and distribution that goes to where the community needs it most.
• Decentralization without resources puts the responsibility on local people without providing the necessary support.
• This event demonstrated how the urban poor have organized and have become a constituency to be reckoned with (to whom government must be accountable) by engaging multiple stakeholders in urban planning and budget processes. There is a need for successful "democratic management of cities by social participation" and there are a number of tools which grassroots women leaders have used to engage government such as local-to-local dialogues and participatory budgets.

3. What were the main points raised by panellists and participants in relation to these different issues? What new ideas have been generated as a result of the discussion?

Tessie Fernandez, Lihok Philippina - The Philippines

When the urban poor organized and mobilized their communities to vote, they elected a mayor that was accountable to them. As a result, an office for the poor was created at the municipal level as a collaboration between the Mayor and Lihok Filipina (an NGO) and programs such as a community mortgage program, and policies such as the ordinance of land tenure were created.

When government processes such as court systems fail, people come up with their own solutions - for example, GROOTS Kenya has community watch groups for widows being evicted from their land, and Bantay Banay (neighbourhood watch groups and members of Lihok) have similar groups that intervene to stop violence in their neighborhoods.

The lesson learned is that collaborating / establishing partnerships between grassroots women leaders, NGOs and local governments are effective ways to advocate for acquiring land, ending violence, and allocating budget resources to infrastructure needs to the community.

Elizaveta Bozhkova, Information Center of the Independent Women's Forum (ICIWF) - Russia

ICIWF worked in Petrozavodsk to open up public space where they have a documentation and resource center for and about women. ICIWF trains on social tools for participation - for example, in Petrozavodsk they held a contest for the "best community," in order to foster an understanding of "community" and collective work to improve neighborhoods.

ICIWF did a mapping of crime which showed that neighborhoods that are "organized" resulted in reduced crime rates. Lesson learned: when the government fails to do such research, the community can do it themselves and prove the importance of their work, to garner more support for it from the govt.

4. What process steps have been identified in your event that could help turn ideas into operational reality?

• Foundations can partner with global networks such as Cordaid and the Huairou Commission are doing, to link local to global and support women as a crucial factor in local development, and get a voice in global arenas.
• NGOs and local government need to learn how one another function.
• NGOs train other stakeholders (policemen, local authorities, etc.) on violence against women.