Womanifesto: a journey for participatory democracy and accountability

Day 2 11am 2 hours English

Women in Asia and the Pacific continue to demand for economic justice and livelihood sustainability, health and occupational safety, education, social security and benefits, access to and control over land and resources, access to justice and protection from all forms of violence and corporate accountability. The persistence of these demands only proves that the globalisation regime in the last four decades had been channeling the wealth from the toiling people to the rich, from developing countries to the wealth countries deepening further inequalities in power, resources and wealth between the poor and the rich, between countries and between women and men.

This manifests the neoliberal system’s failure to make human rights and development work for women. The prevalence of neglect for basic social and economic rights paints the real face of injustices and inequalities that neoliberalism creates and preserved by militarism and authoritarian rule.

Neoliberalism and militarism are symbiotic systems in maintaining and preserving power, wealth and resources of the global empires, national ruling systems and their corporations. Militarism and its important character—authoritarianism, does the securing of the neoliberal system that amasses more wealth for the already wealthy and neglects the poor and the rest of the people and captures national budgets for military spending, while neoliberalism dictates how militarism operates.

Both systems reinforce and perpetuate patriarchy, another system that represses women to be on equal level and footing with the male counterparts due to embedded and institutionalised discrimination against women. Amplifying women’s political demands, organising women as movements and mobilising them to make the state and power structures accountable is the essence of the Womanifesto.

It is asserting participatory democracy, transformative leadership, accountability and fighting back. The Womanifesto is about the exercise and assertion of women’s political agenda that seek policy and structural reforms and solutions. Equally, it is also about building the capacity of women to understand the inherent rights and power they have, organise themselves to shift the power relations and control and maneuver political and patriarchal obstacles that limit their mobility, participation and political engagements.