NEED magazine caught up with Yifat Susskind, the communications director for MADRE, for a conversation on gender, human rights and development. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, MADRE is an organization that works internationally demanding human rights for women and families.

Q. From your perspective, how adequately are gender issues/gender rights being addressed in development policies or international politics? Are they being overlooked?

A. I think there has been enough demand by women’s rights activists, both men and women, who understand the importance of women’s rights to achieving broader visions of social justice that at this point, there’s a lot of recognition of that. And it’s mostly, unfortunately, in the form of lip service. But, I think that when you have a very long-term struggle like promoting genuine development and women’s rights internationally, that you need to read the signs and understand what stage of that struggle you’re at. To give you an example, it’s not immaterial that leaders do feel the pressure to at least give lip service to those issues. Because there was a time, not very long ago, when women’s perspectives and the word gender was nowhere to be seen in any of those policy circles.

Q. What are some of the obstacles to achieving gender equality especially in developing countries?

A. I think one really big obstacle is the compartmentalization of issues and the lack of an understanding of how gender rights affect economic rights, affect cultural rights, affect issues ranging from peace and conflict to climate change to water conservation. All of these issues have very, very deep gender implications. And if you’re not able to look at the whole then you’re not really able to make good decisions about how to move forward in a way that can account for real development and real progress for everybody.

Q. Do you think that message is getting through, are agencies changing their approach?

A. I think it’s very slow-going and I think you can point to areas of progress and you can point to areas of backlash. I think for us it is really important to keep our eyes on the prize, so to speak, and to know where we’re going and be able to really build on the successes and really look at the places where there’s not progress, and try to figure that out.

Q. Could you highlight some of MADRE’s accomplishments in the area of development?

A. The first thing that comes to mind is this is actually MADRE’s 25th anniversary year. We were founded in 1983, and there aren’t that many organizations like MADRE who have worked in a very political way and who have worked in a really principled way around social justice issues who have lasted this long. I think that the life-span of the organization really speaks to the fact that MADRE as an organization, hit on a really good model for how to do this kind of work and how to create, not just in rhetoric, but in deeds how to create partnerships between women and men in the US who care about the issues we work on and women and families around the world who in a lot of ways, are kind of the people on the front lines of global crises.

Q. What excites you about MADRE’s work and/or about the state of global gender equality?

A. For me what’s incredibly exciting and what makes me happy to come to work in the morning every day is the really incredible work that women in communities are doing all around the world on these issues. It’s kind of funny because a lot of times if I’m telling people about my work they’ll say, “oh my god isn’t that depressing you have to deal with violence against women and poverty and people’s children dying from preventable diseases and floods and droughts and all these terrible things, isn’t it depressing?” The irony is that it’s not depressing at all because we’re constantly working with women whose daily lives are about those kinds of headlines and they’re not giving into despair. They’re working with us to create the kinds of responses in their communities that they need first of all, in some cases to save lives in the moment, sometimes it’s about real emergency mode. But also to build really long-term solutions and they’re incredibly motivated by the knowledge that if they do this really hard work today that their daughters are going to have a better shot at going to school, at saying no to their husbands, or at getting to decide what they want to be when they grow up. And in the end that’s what everybody wants for their kids, is to be taken care of and to be able to make choices and have options that are going to let that person reach their potential. That’s not different whether it’s in New York City or in some very small village in Kenya.

Q. What can NEED readers do to make a positive impact on the women’s/gender equality movement and in the lives of women throughout the world?

A. I think that for those of us in this country, part of the challenge is feeling like you have access to accurate information and finding some ways to make a connection to people. That’s not always easy. You might see something in the headlines that really ignites your compassion for people but it doesn’t mean that you have any concrete way at your disposal to reach out to families in Palestine or Darfur, or Guatemala or wherever you’re reading about. That’s one thing that MADRE offers to people in the U.S. It’s a way to get a first-hand understanding of what the impacts of policies and social conditions are for kind of ordinary women and families in the countries where we work. But it’s also a way to partner with those women, and to reach out to them and support them. I think that anybody who pays attention to the news regularly in this country has periodically had that feeling of like “oh god I just don’t want to read the paper today it’s too depressing” and giving in to that option that we have because these things are not happening in our own lives, thankfully, but giving in to that option I think is a matter, not of people not caring, but of people really having compassion and understanding how terrible those situations are. But if you don’t have a way to connect to those people and reach out to them and help them it becomes very demoralizing to constantly expose yourself to these terrible headlines of the war in Iraq, children dying of AIDS in Rwanda or whatever the story may be. It makes a tremendous difference to have a way to reach out to people who are in that situation. And people wind up learning a lot about their own lives in being able to sort of put their own situations here in the US into a political context.

For more information visit http://www.madre.org/

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 11:04 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.