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The Global Women's Action Network for Children 2006 Conference

Conference Overview and Purpose

Launch of the Global Women's Action Network for Children: Powerful Women Standing Up for Powerless Women and Children

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.
--Terry Tempest Williams

• A mother dies from childbirth every minute and millions more mothers suffer lifelong disabilities each year;
• 450 newborn babies die every hour 4 million a year;
• 11 million mothers and children under 5 die each year mostly from preventable causes; and
• 100 million school age children do not go to school; 55 percent of them girls who need to be empowered through education.

The morally intolerable, relentless and largely preventable loss of mother and child life and potential is an affront to humankind and human progress. It can and must be stopped through the urgent, collective and persistent voices and actions of women. We are gathering in Jordan to build those voices and actions.

The lives of women and children are inextricably intertwined. Both are disproportionately victimized by the violence of war and abuse at home, by poverty, disease, poor health care, education, and inadequate shelter and food. Vast numbers of female-headed households, female illiteracy, lack of legal protections, and other deprivations are all directly related to the status and empowerment of girls and women. Despite significant gains, too few women have access and clout at the tables of economic, political, business, media, cultural, and faith-based decision making. And there has not been enough focused, collaborative, synergistic and sustained action between advocates for children, advocates for women, and advocates for youths; between women leaders inside government and leaders for women, youth and children, in the media and corporate sectors outside government. The potential joint contribution of powerful organized women leaders across sectors on behalf of powerless women and children devoted to accelerating progress on maternal and newborn mortality and health and girls' education is enormous and long overdue. The Global Women’s Action Network for Children seeks to be a key catalyst and vehicle for realizing that potential by adding new advocacy voices to important ongoing efforts.

Women are still the principal caregivers and nurturers of children and families despite an evolving consciousness that men must, can and should be nurturers and caregivers too. Increasingly, the economic contribution that women make to their families is all but critical to a family's wellbeing as the extraordinary success of the global microcredit campaign has shown. Women must demand that those in power recognize the basic human needs and rights of women and children when critical economic and political decisions are made.

If the values and priorities of our world and, of nations who disproportionately influence our world like the United States, are to be changed and they must be changed women, especially mothers and grandmothers, and those with a mothering spirit will have to demand it. Rich women and poor women and those in between. Powerful women and empowered powerless women. Corporate women and political and philanthropic women. Community women and women of faith. Girls, young women and old women. All together determined to build a new world fit for children and for everyone and to do whatever it takes, however long it takes, to succeed. Women who fear God more than any political leader. Women who are tired of war and violence against themselves and their children. Women who have had enough of cowering in the shadows of men who brutalize and terrorize their bodies and their psyches and their children. Women who are tired of dirty water in African and Asian villages, in hurricane ravaged U.S. Gulf Coast areas, and in the polluted oceans and rivers and lakes where our children swim with bacteria that sicken and kill the body and pollute the food pregnant women and all of us eat. Women who are tired of dirty air and dirty streets and dirty soil poisoned by toxins which breed cancer and asthma and dysentery. Women sick of dirty airwaves which pollute our children’s minds and values and glorify violence and disrespectful treatment of women. Women tired of public and corporate policies which deny them fair wages, working conditions, and opportunities to scale the job ladder without detours and snags privileged men never face. Women who want better balance between their work and family responsibilities. While men must assume far more of their responsibility for children, they will not do so until women demand it.

Standing on the rim of a new century and millennium, we have been given an incredible moral moment of opportunity and responsibility to think differently, even radically, about the kind of world we want to build for our children and their children. Everyone is safe if children are safe. How do we work together with an even greater sense of urgency and effectiveness for mothers and children building on the extraordinary work already being done by so many of you attending this Jordan conference? How do we change direction; reverse more rapidly the morally obscene and tragic statistics of maternal and child mortality, illiteracy, violence and poverty; spark a greater sense of urgency about saving our babies and the women who birth and nurture them; and begin to redefine progress in our world and nations in terms of conscience rather than consumption; and morality, common sense and justice rather than greed and rampant individualism and materialism?

In order to foster peace, women must promote economic justice, end child and family poverty and illiteracy, and empower poor women. In order to make and keep peace, we must work to end the arms race and make war an unacceptable option for solving problems. In order to foster tolerance, we must teach our children basic respect for human life and human rights and eliminate the threat of violence from our own lives, their lives, and the lives of others. But these are very, very hard things to do in isolation, even for women who are leaders and in powerful positions without a critical mass of support inside and outside government. To make a greater difference for ourselves, our children and families, women need stronger relationships that grow through concerted action on issues of mutual interest. We need facilitated time for strategic thinking and affirmation of our leadership. We need a chance to tell our stories and to hear the stories of others. We need ways to confront and dispel our fears and prejudices about other women from different races and income levels and religions and cultures. We need opportunities to think through how to engage unlikely allies to meet the human needs and protect the human rights of women and children and everyone. We need to share successful strategies, experiences, and best practices, and grapple with how to sustain and expand them. We need to win some victories together and be emboldened to win more and bigger ones. And we need a place or a network within which to communicate, stay in touch with each other, share our challenges and successes, and gain strength from each other.

We hope our June Jordan gathering of women leaders will lead to new relationships, collaborations, urgency and actions toward building a world worthy of children God's gifts of the future. We hope a bold, aggressive, persistent and combined voice will emerge across sectors to carry the concerns of women and children into the halls of power to change a world in which too few have too much at the expense of so many who have so little. We hope to help broaden the policy, political and public conversation in our nations and world and find ways to break out of and transcend the policy, bureaucratic, and funding silos that impede more rapid progress on preventable maternal and newborn mortality, AIDS and other diseases, girls' education, and female and child victimization which are symptoms of deeper systemic and unjust global and national structures and priorities.

Something is out of balance in a world in which the 691 richest people's total wealth of over 2.2 trillion dollars exceeds the Gross National Product of the 88 poorest nations on earth with a combined population of 2.9 billion. Something is out of balance when, according to Save the Children’s "Mother's Index," a mother in the bottom 10 countries was found to be more than 750 times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than mothers in the top 10 industrialized countries.

Transforming system change does not spring up from nothing; it is seeded and nurtured over time by information, training, skills building, leadership and community infrastructure development, bonding, trust, experience, circumstances, perception, passion, personal commitment, and advocacy. Our deepest hope is for a new movement forged from the morally outraged voices and focused, determined actions of women—young and old, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, empowered mothers and all those with a mothering spirit, ready to do whatever it takes to change a resource rich but spiritually impoverished world that permits a child to die every second from preventable poverty and disease — 38,000 every day; a mother to die in childbirth every minute — 529,000 a year; 60 newborns to die every hour — 4 million a year; millions of mothers more to suffer lifelong impairment from childbirth; and 100 million children, 55 percent girls, to be denied an education a sentence to social and economic death in our globalizing world.

The Linkages Between Maternal and Child Health Status and Girls' Education

Strong linkages exist between female education, fertility and women's and children's health status. Studies show that the infant mortality rate was almost three times higher among illiterate mothers and that the mortality rate of children one to four years old was ten times higher than those with mothers who had completed secondary or higher levels of education. The loss of a mother in childbirth denies her children their primary caregiver and significantly increases the risk her infant will die in the first week or month of life or fail to survive to age five. A motherless child under five is twice as likely to die as a child whose mother survives. And a mother’s death detrimentally affects her children's access to education and health care over their lifetime. A Save the Children report highlights three areas of most influence on child wellbeing: female education, presence of a trained attendant at birth and family planning services.

Girls who remain in school generally marry later and have fewer years of child bearing. More educated women have better reproductive health knowledge; are more empowered to make family size decisions; have improved health and nutritional status and utilize key services. An almost ten-fold difference exists in the proportion of women who obtained prenatal care and skilled health professional care during childbirth based on the total years of education completed.

A majority of countries continue to lag considerably in achieving both universal primary completion and gender parity of educational opportunities and will have to substantially accelerate their efforts if these Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are to be met. Similarly, a majority of countries continue to lag in progress on the MDGs for maternal and child mortality and health. Hopefully, we can and will make a difference in accelerating progress in both areas in our nations and globally.

The June 11-13, 2006 Jordan meeting builds on a series of quiet planning meetings over the past five years convened by the Children's Defense Fund with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to explore how to build stronger bridges between prominent women leaders and leaders for children and between powerful women across sectors for powerless women and children within the U.S. and globally; and the social, economic, political, and cultural barriers that must be overcome to better protect women and children. In a February 2004 meeting at the Rockefeller Foundation Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, women from every continent decided to launch a Global Women’s Action Network for Children seeking to help catalyze a movement to achieve specific goals through the implementation of action and advocacy strategies within and among our key networks and nations to save and improve poor children’s and mothers’ lives. We identified two achievable goals that we hoped we could immediately pursue, add value to, and make a measurable difference for the world’s women and their children: maternal and child mortality and health and girls’ education. By combining voices for women and for children nationally and around the world, we hope to help create a synergy that will strengthen both the women’s and children’s movements which will send ripples of hope across the fractured world.

What is the Global Women's Action Network for Children's added value among many global networks? New advocacy voices from powerful women leaders across sectors, faith and age, united with advocates for children and youths on behalf of powerless women and children; a strong focus on action and helping create and sustain the political will to do what we know works; and on the ground efforts to realize the selected MDGs in one or more countries where progress is lagging. And working collaboratively with others, we hope to add heft to the national campaigns in the U.S. in monitoring budget commitments to and urging greater support for accelerating the investments in maternal and child health and girls’ education nationally and globally.

Actions the Network Proposes to Discuss in Jordan Include Immediate and Longer-term Strategies for:

• Raising a stronger more united and focused voice across sectors of prominent women leaders for powerless women and children. Leaders for women, children and for youth, acting in concert, can forge an irresistible, collective and political force stronger than our parts.
• Expanding community, national, regional and global media and public awareness efforts to keep visible the preventable death and suffering of poor mothers and children; the growing gap between rich and poor; and the huge social and economic development gains for our nations and world of healthy and educated women and girls.
• Engaging in persistent targeted actions to accelerate the rate of progress and achieve success on mother and child health and girls’ education in 1, 2 or 3 nations, applying best practices and sustained assistance and advocacy.
• Engaging in global and national advocacy in the selected areas to ensure more adequate resource commitments from developed nations and accountable, transparent actions in all nations to ensure measurable results in mothers and children's health and girls' education.
• Increasing the understanding, commitment, passion and sisterhood among prominent women committed to stand for powerless women and children through annual Maternal and Child Health and Education Watches, a Global Interfaith Day of Prayer; and regular communication of best practices and opportunities for action through a web site and dedicated staff.
• Creation of an Innovation Fund to help expand best practices in maternal and child health and girls' education in other "ready" geographic areas and networks and to increase the leadership and community capacity to sustain them.

We welcome your ideas and look forward to a robust discussion and commitment to specific actions. Think hard about how your talent, resources and networks can add to a bigger voice for the voiceless in our world.

Phone: 202-628-8787
800-CDF-1200 (800-233-1200)

GWANC Coordinator: Ecaterina Marshall
emarshall@childrensdefense.org