A WOW! e-Brief

Work of Women program @ World Neighbors

February 2007

Introduction

Overview of the World Social Forum

 

World Neighbors at the World Social Forum:

An Interview with Lydia Tapsoba, MS

Lydia Tapsoba is World Neighbors coordinator of action learning in reproductive health for West Africa. In this role she oversees West African activities related to health. These include training and supporting community based workers in health, promoting family planning, and providing support to clinics and hospitals at the community level. She also manages gender activities in the region, including recent work to integrate gender into West African programs. She had the opportunity in January, thanks to funding from the New Field Foundation, to attend the World Social Forum. WOW! interviewed her upon her return to Burkina Faso.

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WOW: What is your overall impression of the World Social Forum and what impact do you think it has?

Tapsoba: The World Social Forum in Nairobi was very well organized, with many events and activities. There were many, many people from developing countries and from developed countries also. There were lots of activities, including presentations, meetings and protests. Many, many of those activities were very impressive. For example, some talked about what is not good in the world. The international community was criticized because a lot of promises are made, but many are not acted upon. There were a lot of protests. For me, it is a place where people can freely express their feelings, and that is positive. If you are angry over something and you can not speak about it, that’s not a good situation.

      

We were there with the New Field Foundation delegation, which was very important because of the translation needs we had. Kenya is an English-speaking country, and we are a French country, and two of the community women that came with us don’t speak French. So we needed translation – even though my English improved throughout the days I was there! It was a very positive experience.

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What was your favorite aspect of the forum?

I attended a number of presentations, including ones on reproductive health and gender, violence against women, reproductive rights, and a rural women’s forum. There were a lot of options, and very good presentations, very good quality. Being in that environment made me realize that our situation in West Africa is not so different from other countries, even the United States. Women have some of the same problems all over the world, for example violence against women. This was very interesting. It showed me that our struggles are not only in Burkina Faso. Sometimes we want to go somewhere else because we think it is easier there, but we must stay here and work here to improve our countries and life for women. I saw that in some ways, Burkina is better off than some countries even though we have struggles.

I also very much liked the opportunity to meet other people and learn about other organizations. For example, Les Pénélopes is interested in developing a program with us to have Web sites for women’s organizations. Femmes de la Terre helped us find tools to use in our work to prevent violence against women. New Field Foundation did a training on how to use a digital camera, the Internet, Skype. These things will help us communicate more freely! And we visited some organizations that New Field partners with, ones that work on HIV/AIDS. I was very impressed. I received some good knowledge on how to proceed, and I realized that we need to catch up in some of our HIV/AIDS work. We can learn a lot from others. In general, we had good results from our participation in this forum.

What did World Neighbors contribute to the events?

We gave two presentations, one by APDC [an organization with which World Neighbors partners] and one by World Neighbors. Our presentation was about a women’s health issue, uterine prolapse. It is an invisible condition, because women do not talk about it. We presented the results of our study, including how to care for women with this condition, and how to prevent it. APDC presented on women’s literacy. They spoke about how literacy affects women’s development, and how it changes their lives.

The people who heard my presentation on uterine prolapse in general did not know what it is. They think it is not a problem in their areas, for example in Guinea. I responded that I had reviewed some studies of the condition in Guinea, and I knew that it was a problem there. The APDC presentation included two community women who spoke about how literacy helped them personally, saying they can now participate in decision making and are more involved in village work. It was very powerful, and people were impressed to see the community level participation.

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What else would you like to share about your experience?

At World Neighbors we have very good experience working with communities. We have a good approach, but we don’t share the results as much as we could. We want the results to spread. Events like this forum are a way to spread these results, to share with others what our successes are, what our difficulties are. This will increase our impact because we have good experience that can help other countries, other organizations.

It was also a way to improve our knowledge in many subjects. For example, I didn’t know what food sovereignty is, but I learned about it there. I learned about some troubling things that some companies want to do, and how important it is for us to know about this. So it is just a few days of meetings, but you can learn a lot of things. I would like to say that World Neighbors must encourage participation even from the community level. We were only five people there, and there were thousands of activities. If more people could take part, we could have attended more of them, and had greater visibility.

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Prior to joining World Neighbors in 2005, Tapsoba worked with several other nongovernmental and community-based organizations, leading activities in areas such as HIV/AIDS, safe maternity, youth and female genital cutting. She earned her masters degree in sociology from the University of Burkina Faso in Ouagadougou, with a focus on health and international development.

 

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