 ac yn fwyaf yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, diolch â'r ddolw â'i lawr. Felly ydych yn gwybod mai o'r ddweud o'r ddweud yn y ddweud o'r structures patriarchal, ac yn ymgyrch â'r ddweud o'r sgwrs feministiau yn y ddysgolwyr a'r dyscorsor. A'n ddweud, yn ddweud, a'n ddod o'r ddweud o gwyman nhw'n ddysgolwyr, sy'n dod o'r ddweud o'r ddysgolwyr yn y ddysgolwyr, mae'n gwybod i'r bwysig o'r Llyfrgell Uddiadol, o'r Centralwyth Afrygfa, a'r Llatyn America, ac mae'n gweithio bod hanfodol o'r rhaid i'w cysylltiau yr adroddau'r newydd. Y rhai objectau'r ffordd yw'r cyffredin iawn i gael ddwyllen ac ymddiogel a'r gweithiau a'r gweithio'r fforddau a'r ffordd o'r gweithio'r gweithio'r awrwyr yn y ffordd, as far as possible, diversity and inclusivity in our analysis and our learning. And the Feminist Disarmament Project, we also aim to look at structural and practical obstacles facing women who are working in the field. Thank you Nancy for the introduction to Scrap Weapons and to this webinar series. My name is Yvanur and I'm the other coordinator and moderator for this webinar and also a researcher at Scrap Weapons. I'm really excited to have you all here and to learn from our panelists who have agreed to share their knowledge and expertise with us. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about this webinar specifically. During the last few decades, we believe that there has been a significant improvement at the global, national and local levels in ensuring that women have more important role in decision making sphere when it comes to peace building and disarmament. However, needless to say that there has remained considerable work to be done to ensure that women from all areas of the globe have the practical and financial support to be able to occupy a high position and have a meaningful participation in decision making. This webinar aims to understand how women can enter and progress in the sphere. We aim to explore the challenges and obstacles that women face as they enter and progress in the field of disarmament. Question that will be explored include what are the trends and funding available for women and why, what education and training opportunities for women striving to enter the field exist. What are the practical and cultural challenges for women in disarmament discourse, policy and practice. The webinar aims to place this theme within a broader socio-political context, during in particular on the regional experiences and advice from established institutions which provide training and mentoring in peace building and disarmament for women. But now let me tell you a bit more about the structure of the webinar. We will first hear from Kayla McGill from Women in International Security, Vice, whose presentation will focus on the general trends in funding for women-led organisation. Then our next three panellists will focus on the training opportunities and obstacles in the region and the work they have done in the past few years with the organisation to tackle such challenges. We will first hear from Suher Maddi from Human Security Initiative Organisation and from Global Partnership for the Prevention of Arm Conflict. She will talk mostly about Sudan and East Africa. Then it will be followed by Amel Nongo from Women's International Lead for Peace and Freedom Cameron. We will talk about Cameron and West Africa. And finally we will hear from Dr Minakshi Gopinath from Women in Security Conflict Management and Peace and she will talk about India and South Asia. Do you not hesitate to ask questions if you have them in the chat during the presentation as there will be a Q&A at the end. But now let me introduce our first speaker that you can see on the screen, Kayla McGill. She is the programme manager and a fellow at Women in International Security where she oversees project and programming. She conducts research and analysis, contributes to strategic initiatives across the organisation. Kayla is a trained analytical researcher focusing on gender and international security, culture and narrative studies and Eastern European tribalism. Kayla previously worked for the Women's Starts Project contributing to publication and US congressional testimonials working with qualitative and quantitative data and representing the project at events such as Beijing plus 20 CSW 59 at the United Station. Kayla, the floor is yours. Thank you so much for that introduction and thank you Nancy for having me and for scrap weapons for having me today. I'm truly looking forward to hearing from my fellow panellists and discussing this important topic. I'm also really happy to be representing WISE today as much of the work we do focuses on promoting women's leadership and professional development in this field. And a key component of our work is in conducting research and policy engagement initiatives and critical international security issues including the nexus between gender and security. Also as a non profit organisation, this topic hits especially close to home. So as even though I said I will be giving a broad overview and kind of discussing a few main trends in funding for women led organisations and gender focus organisations in just disarmament peace and security. There's a few main trends that I want to go over and there's good news and bad news. So first looking at the good news and the positive trends. Gender mainstreaming is becoming more accepted in organisations such as the UN. The UN Office for Office for Disarmament Affairs or UN ODA has been active these past few years and has been working with partners such as other international organisations like the organization for security and cooperation in Europe and a lot of civil society actors to promote women in disarmament. Their disarmament fellowships are particularly noteworthy and misregard and in 2016 they actually updated their gender mainstreaming action plan. More generally UN women's funding increased in 2019 by about 20 million US dollars and additionally bilateral aid from UN states directed towards women's organisations has stayed stebly about 0.2% of all bilateral funding. That's about 96 million dollars on average. The private sector is also becoming a lot more prevalent in funding gender initiatives. Foundations like the Ford Foundation or the Gates Foundation typically spend between 17 to 20% of their human rights funding on gender and equality issues around the world. In the arms control and disarmament field mentioned needs to be made of the plowshares fund as well. It has pledged 1 million dollars to greater gender diversity and disarmament through research and other opportunities. Additionally there are groups like the gender champions in disarmament and the gender champions in nuclear policy that are based at the nuclear threat initiative. This brings together organisations to promote a gender balance and gender perspective in the field. Close to 70 organisations have already adopted the gender parity pledge by the gender champions and nuclear policy as well. Next going to be the somewhat bad news and the not so positive trends. Unfortunately the amount of funding directed towards gender focus initiatives and organisations in the field remains limited to put it frankly. For example between 2014 to 2017 each year less than 1% of bilateral aid specifically meant for gender equity actually reached women's rights organisations around the world. Of that global funding typically only 8% went to civil societies in developing countries. Additionally less than 3% of the US State Department's budget is allocated for gender equity or women's led organisations or initiatives. And between 2018 and 2020 gender funding from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or the OECD constituted only around 6-9% of its budget. And some funding for all gender initiatives or organisations is typically anywhere between 1% to 9% of budget allocations. Of no certain topics and issues in the gender peace and security realm are typically awarded more funding from this limited allocation than others. According to preliminary reports from the peace and security index 2019 global funding and grants from a variety of international donors. Focus on gender initiatives and disarmament is a much lower percentage with some numbers pointing to a mere $10,000 of grant money going towards gender disarmament issues in all of 2019 compared to around 50,000 for gender and national security or 6.9 million for gender equity. One of the problems in this area is what's known as the trickle-down effect. Essentially funding doesn't always reach those of its intended for in its original large amounts and even when it does there's little to no finalised reporting on it. For example funding from the OECD countries typically goes to a first level funder and of that a third of those first level funders are located in the United States which is another discrepancy. And those first level funders then disperse it. Compounding this issue is that many of those recipients of second or third or fourth level recipients don't have a lot of data reporting capabilities and so there's typically no way to know where the money ends up after it leaves the first level recipients. So all of these trends showed up with little support and no clear funding, there's less incentive to incorporate gender into programming or the analysis of these international peace and security challenges. In 2020, Wise published the gender and security scorecard, a spotlight on the nuclear security community and that link will be in the chat for anybody who'd like to see it. And this examined about 32 US think tanks and 16 international journals focusing on research experts and programs that include nuclear security and gender. We found that of all of the 32 think tanks, only one actually integrated gender into its programming and most of the articles written in the international journals focused on prominent women, not on gender perspectives. And that's not how gender really shapes policy or practices just focusing on women, which is prominent women. So before I wrap up, I want to share a couple of remarks on the underlying factors that influence these funding trends. One of the biggest factors that influences funding is that gender is still not taken seriously by those in power. This is an overarching trend in all areas of security and peace, and one that feminist scholars have written extensively about. But the bottom line is that when an issue is not deemed vital by those in security and those in power, it is not funded or promoted. And when people in decision making circles do not see the importance of promoting women's leadership or of organizations that incorporate agenda perspective and things such as disarmament or security, they will not fund them. We do now have data in the broader peace and security realm that shows that when women are included and the gender perspective is applied outcomes are better and they're more effective. This empirical data and research should motivate policymakers and funders to take seriously both women's leadership and the application of a gender perspective when considering international peace and security issues, including arms control and disarmament. A second underlying factor has to do with the increase in new technologies, and I'm really glad Nancy, you mentioned something about this earlier because this is a big issue. As is typical in many areas of security and peace building, women do not make up a large portion of experts in the emerging cyber technologies or weapons fields. This leads to a lack of women's leadership and voices in this area that has immense cross cutting focus that impacts all areas of peace and security. This is an area where efforts to increase the number of women and women's leadership should be supported and focused on because since this is a relatively new and emerging issue, we have the potential of getting it right at the start. Related to these new technologies is financial reporting and long term funding. Smaller nonprofits and women's leds organizations and grant recipients must be able to utilize new technologies such as data collection and analysis or tools such as that to provide metrics for success. There's a trend that shows that organizations or individuals which utilize this type of tech to provide hard statistics on progress are more likely to gain continues funding and larger grants. Unfortunately, most nonprofits or organizations lack the capacity to either train staff or even to utilize this technology and they're frequently not even given the opportunity to try and do so by potential funders. So while technology has become more of a daily tool due to the pandemic and the virtual world we live in, many organizations face discrepancies in access to technology and in capacity to to utilize it. So training and capacity building regarding new tech has far reaching consequences to these fields and they're consistently underfunded. A final underlying factor has to do with the influences of crises on funding. Funding is frequently redirected from gender and women leds organizations or issues and times of crises. Unfortunately, we're seeing this play out in the form of a global pandemic today where many women led and gender equality organizations that focus on disarmament, peace and security are either at risk or have already had to close their doors due to funding restrictions. This is brought about by COVID-19. And this is especially prevalent in lower and middle income countries. A link local report showed that in 2020 of 125 civil society organizations located in low and middle income countries around the world, about 22% of which focus on gender, nearly 45% of those 125 organizations had funding problems and were not able to secure new funders specifically do. To the effects of the pandemic. Essentially funding vital work should not stop during a crisis. Instead, funding for crises should include funding for existing initiatives and women led and gender organizations that focus on security and development issues. And finally, I'd like to emphasize that mentorship and elevating new generations of leaders, scholars and policymakers in this field is key to sustain change in peace. Wise is proud to have been mentoring young women to enter the field for over 35 years and will continue to do so with the support and help from our partners and other organizations, such as these wonderful organizations that are represented by my fellow panelists. So that kind of is a broad overview of some of the main funding trends and a lot of the underlying factors that influence these trends as well. So I really look forward to hearing from my fellow panelists and learning a lot from their expertise on the specifics of these challenges and these opportunities in the field. Well, thank you, Kayla, for this great presentation and for a great opening to our webinar, outlining the key trends in funding worldwide and how they are linked to training capacities for women, which I'm sure we will hear more from our other panelists. It's great to hear also of positive trends, including the grown recognition of women's vital role in implementing disarmament. However, of course, as you spoke so eloquently and so greatly on there is so much more work to be done. So I will now just go ahead and introduce our next panelist who unfortunately, as we mentioned, is not able to be here to deliver a live presentation, but we do have a prerecorded presentation for her. And this is Suher Mahdi Mohir-Eledin, who is a Sudanese woman who believes in the role of women in change. Since 2004, she has been working with the Human Security Initiative Organization and is now executive director. The organization is a member of the Middle East and North Africa Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, as well as the International Action Network and Small Arms. Suher's activities mainly deal with human security perspectives, specifically in relation to small arms and light weapons, the disarmament demobilization and reintegration program, and peace building in Sudan. She has presented many papers dealing with such programs and activities, including an article on the role of women in the Sudanese Revolution in 2019, which was titled Marching Towards Inclusion in Sudan, and it was published by GPAC. One distinguished project that Suher has supervised was titled Enhancing the Role of Hakamat on Peace Building, which targeted influential women in Darfur to change their concepts on peace building, such as through singing and provide them with new terms for peace. We have posted this in the chat and we encourage you to look at this later, perhaps after the webinar. We have also posted a second link, which Suher requested us to do, which is a study on disarmament research in Darfur, Sudan, also coordinated by Suher. So, now we will just wait for the video. Thank you. Hello everybody. Thank you to the organiser of this webinar for the opportunity and the leadership in supporting women in disarmament. My name is Suher Mahadi from Sudan. I work with Human Security Initiative for Organization Abbreviation Maaman since 2004. I have been working on advancing human security as an alternative to securitized and militarized measures to address conflict in my work. We organized nationally programs on community security and supporting empowerment in arm control and disarmament. We are a member of Middle East and North Africa Partnership for Prevention of Arm Conflict, International Action Network for Small Arm, IANSA, and Arab Network for Tolerance. Also Maaman is a member of the National Focal Points that was established upon the European Declaration and is a program for disarmament. If we talk about the importance of women and feminist respect for disarmament and peace building, I want to start by bringing the issue of human security into the discussion. I think this conversation could benefit if we remind ourselves about the linkage between human security, disarmament and human peace and security. And, deniably, women and this are disproportionately affected by conflict. Not only because they are more likely to get less access to security, but also because they are become subject of warfare and used to achieve political gains. However, women are also the critical stakeholders in implementing and advancing human security principles that stand beyond mere disarmament and advance border social transformation. Human security inspires a people-centered approach, just like the women's peace and security agenda. It encourages us to look at live people experiences that have been overlooked to conflict. Women's peace and security and human security tell us if we overlook these experiences. Nothing will change. This agenda creates a demand for disarmament action. But not only for disarmament action, human peace and security and human security inspire borders transformation of society. They make a point that women belong everywhere in political space, in peace building, in human rights, in disarmament and in security. Women can play an influential role in peace negotiations and peace building programs. Women also have the analysis needed to raise awareness of their communities, governments, international stakeholders. On the impact of armed conflict and misuse of small arms and increased people for disarmament and armed control. So, if we focus on education, training and mentoring from an organisational perspective, that is why we work to provide research on the interlinkage between human security, disarmament and human peace and security and support women to advance their own analysis in their communities and their context and engage with decision makers on where to focus and what intervention is needed. This work helps us to raise awareness about the impact of armed and spread different types of security analysis rooted in human security, community building and social cohesion. With this research we conducted, we supported the R program in developing effective public information and communication strategies for different levels of stakeholders and audiences to reduce the broad definition of small arms and light women in their four states. We in Western Sudan work with Haqama women who are uniquely influential in their communities. They compose songs and poetics words to raise or condemn someone. It gives them a unique power to mobilize their people, encourage peace in communities. This is another evidence of the fact that women, when women are given influential position or role, they can meaningfully transform their societies. In this, women do not have to stick to typical women issues. They can and should engage on more complex questions to further advance their transformative analysis. They promote messages of peace, co-existence and rendering them as moral tools to address securitization and militarization. This is for those Haqama women in Western Sudan work. Another point we can focus on funding issues. The ability of society transformation, a lot of challenges, however, I can say that lack of adequate funding. Funding is less funding and the quality of funding as well is very lack. In Sudan since 2019, the funding opportunities is declined and even the facilities for training is also related to security and political issues as well. This is related to security and political situation prevailed since that time due to Sudanese revolution, strikes and instability followed by the lockdown due to COVID-19. It will be a lot of time until we can really understand the impact of COVID-19 on the donorship. It is also not clear to me how the international community is planning to address this issue. To overcome this funding opportunities, me in a pack, organise and conduct a series of training programs and seminars targeting her members and interested activists. However, another issue is appropriate locally sensitive funding. We normally get the money to support some short-term donor priorities and it does not allow us to develop long-term strategies for transformative changes in our communities. Usually this fund comes from intermediaries that may or may not understand and support local ownership. Sometimes this money is connected to the goal the intermediaries pursue rather than the goal we need to achieve in order to build peace without arms in Sudan, for example. Therefore, I would like to encourage further support of the practical work on bridging the women's peace and security, human security and these are meant together in a way that allows for local ownership and adequately financed. Thank you very much. Thank you, Suher, for this incredibly interesting presentation which has really exemplified and built on some of the funding and practical issues which Kayla spoke about in the beginning. You know, you've done this through speaking about your experiences in implementing disarmament at the national and local levels in Sudan. And also for highlighting just how critical women are in these processes by contributing to different training programs to achieve peace in local communities. So thank you very much for that. And now I will go ahead and introduce our third speaker, who is Armel Nadongo. Armel is a gender specialist. She holds a master's in strategic communication and rotathecesis in 2016 on the United Nations Security Council resolutions 1325 in Cameroon. She joined the organisation Wilf Cameroon in 2014 with the aim of contributing to breaking gender stereotypes and building a world free of armed conflict. As disarmament coordinator, she encourages women and girls to engage in the field of disarmament, which has long been a male preserve. Armel firmly believes that no less than peace can be achieved without women. We have a PowerPoint that Armel has prepared that hopefully will be posted in the group. It may just be loading. We do encourage you please to open this and to follow the PowerPoint as we hear from Armel in her presentation now. Thank you. I am Armel Nadongo from Wilf Cameroon. I am the Disarmament Programme Coordinator. I am proud to attend this webinar where I am going to talk about the challenges related to the participation of women in Cameroon in the field of disarmament. Before going deep in my presentation, let me say some few words about Wilf Cameroon. Wilf Cameroon is a civil society organisation set up in 2014 in Cameroon. The mission is to end and prevent war and to make sure that women are fully involved in all the decision making process and our vision is a world free of armed conflict. Coming to the Security Contest in Cameroon, what I can see is that since 2013 Cameroon was deeply involved in the conflict. At the beginning of the Boko Haram, Armel is the nozoo, no-dead and solid crisis and in those two conflict women and girls are very very affected by the illicit proliferation of small arms. You can see in the next slide, you have in my left conventional arm and in my right traditional arm used by terrorists to perpetrate gender violence on women and girls. This is a victim of war in Cameroon. The first slide shows that you can see the presence of Wilf Cameroon attending a workshop on the counselling on victims of war in the northern and southern region. The other picture shows, you can see, a women and a girl were to be perpetrated, a suicide and attacked but fortunately they were caught by military forces. In Cameroon, we as civil society organisations faced many obstacles to really evolve in the field of examinations. We are excluded from some national processes. In 2016 we were contacted by UN Women and Ministry of Women Empowerment to conduct a business study which later on served as the base of our national action plan. But since the national action plan was adopted, we were pushing out of this sector and some organisations are involved in the main action regarding this nap. Coming to the disarmament process, it is true that Cameroon does not yet have a national commission on arm control but the Ministry of External Relations is hosting the permanent secretary of the arm control. But in many actions or activities carried out by the Ministry, we are scaly involved. That is a challenge we are still rising. In one worldwide I can say is that we are not, we lack enough national support in our daily functioning. But this does not stop or limit us in our work. We use to undertake many training, many advocacy and many actions to sensitize on the arm control instrument in Cameroon. Concerning the King Central Convention, these are some actions we have undertaken. This is a community sanitation with the grassroot population on the danger of illicit proliferation of arm in Cameroon. And also we did advocacy, community awareness campaign. One of the, one main action we did and which have a reason is the work with media to sensitize them on the importance to popularize King Central Convention arm trading as far as the killer robot campaign. Coming to the King, IATT, we also carried out many, many actions to first of all to popularize the ATT and then to make the Cameroon, for Cameroon country to ratify the arm trading. And one main reason we have is that in 2018 the Cameroon finally adopted the arm trading and is a section based in New York who call us to inform us that Cameroon has deposited the instrument to ratify the arm trading at the UN permanent security in New York. Apart from those initiatives, women in Cameroon also carry out some initiatives to call on the separaties as far as the government to seize the fire, as you can see in this slide. Apart from this, we are really involved in the implementation of AM-33 King Central Convention as far as killer robot, but we are still facing many challenges and the main one is related to the funding. But before coming to the funding with Cameroon, we interact with some donors as our main donors is reaching critical will. We also have killer robots, ICANN and IANSA to implement an action on the field. But it's true we have some strong funding, but the funding is not sufficient enough to help us carry out all our initiatives. The main, coming to the funding, what challenge we have is that the government sometimes say that we are receiving funding from, I don't know, and we use the funding to destabilise our country. And since 2015, with Cameroon is facing many, many security challenges. Most of the time, our office is broken, our computer is stolen and the prison of Cameroon, most of the time, at this three times, she has been victim of attacks, robot attacks and laptops, internet, USB keys, all of these. All of these taken by the whole bird's town, turns to what we do. We are clear in our work and still now we do not have any formal notification of the work, any formal notification telling us that the work we are doing is not good for the security of our country. And also women lack, women are not trained on the field of disarmament and we also lack information concerning the disarmament issue. And also, even internet is a great challenge for us. I was supposed to record this video yesterday. There wasn't lies, there wasn't internet, so these are some challenges African women, Cameroonian women face to really evolve themselves in the field of disarmament. Last year, we also have challenges with COVID-19 pandemic because we carried out, we wrote a project on to evaluate the disarmament, the DDR process in Cameroon. This project was really important because it helped us to really have an appraisal of the situation in Cameroon concerning the qualification of AMBERT, till now we did not receive any funding to carry out this project. As perspective, what we expect, what we are trying to do now is to engage men to support women initiative in the disarmament process. One example we have is the masculinity project. The masculinity project is a project which aims to involve men in the field of, to involve men to support initiative men, carry out in the field of disarmament. These are some, these are few words I can say about the work we are doing in Cameroon concerning our disarmament program. I am free to answer to your question and any other explanation about my presentation. Thank you so, yes, is it working? I think so. Thank you so much, Armel, for this presentation. I think it was really interesting and the fact that you highlighted that disarmament right now does face a lot of more problem in the global south such as sometimes the lack of light or internet and then COVID happened and it just makes everyone work harder for something that is already not easy to do which is to have women in decision making sphere to do. I'd like to remind everyone that if they have question whether it's for Armel or whether it's for Suher, they can still ask it in the chat because we're in contact with them through WhatsApp and therefore they'll be able to answer through us and I do believe even that Armel managed to join us so if she cannot load a video or a voice because of internet connection she still might be able to answer to your question in a group chat so do not hesitate to ask question there. And she's there. Yes, perfect. Thank you very much, Armel. And finally I'd like to introduce to our last but not least, to our last but not least speaker, Dr Minakshi Gopinath. She will tell us about the obstacles and opportunities for women in India and South Asia. Dr Minakshi Gopinath is an educationist, a founder director of WISCOM that promotes the leadership of South Asian women in the areas of peace, international affairs and regional cooperation. She's also chair, board of governance, centre for policy research, New Delhi and principal emerita of Lady Sri Ram College, New Delhi. A member of multi-track peace initiative in the South Asian region, she's the first woman to have served on national security advisory board of India. Minakshi's work and publication focus on gender security, conflict transformation and education. She has also received national and international awards for work in the field of education and peace building. So, it has no result. I think you still unmute Minakshi. Thank you, Ivanor and Nancy. It's such a pleasure and a privilege to be here with all of you today. And a special thanks really to Scrap for opening up the space for these truly meaningful conversations in true feminist tradition. gan gymlu cyllid Caila ar mellans y rei ar weithio'r gallch eyth gaven amdano, y cair y gallai gynnwys cyllid ymlaen, dim y cair o'ch cyllid yn gwneud arfer unrhyw unrhyw o'ch ddiwedd ymlaen�g, ac mae'n erbyn yn mynd i cwrs yn ôl y dyfodol. Roeddwn i'n credu bod, mae'n hyn whiff erbyn i'n cyhoeddol at gystafol cael ei wneud o'r hyffordd â tynnu gyrthno agnoddau. A sy'n ddangos i ddweud yw'r cyllid gan maen nhw'n ei wneud, I am fathaf yma sydd wedi'u gwneud o'ch cyflawn i'w amddangos i'r ddaf, y gallwn gwneud. Mae'n mynd i gyd yn hwnnw i'ch ddweud y mynd i'w mwyffio ar gyfer y cyflawn i'w amddangos i'r gwaith a'r hunain. Mae'n byw'n digwydd y cwm yn ei ystyried, ac mae'n fydda i'n gwybod cyflawn i'r cyflawn i'w amddangos i'u cyflawn i'w mynd i'w gweithio. sy'n tymp Bürger that is the peg on which our work really stands. It was the south Asian economist Mahbub i deficit who gave it the most evocative kind of interpretation when he said that human security was the child who did not die, a disease that did not spread and a job that was not cut and ethnic tension that did not explode in violence, a dissident who was not silenced I dweud cyfnodd yn gweithio ar gyfer hynny o'r cyfnodd cyfnodd yn niadau a rhai o'r cyfnodd. Ond ydych chi'n gweithio'r cyffredin gyda Cymru, mae'r cyflwynt gyffredin yn 1999, ydy'r hyn yn ysgrifennu'n cwestiynau ar y tynnau cyfwil a cyfwil drwy'n mynd, ac mae'n amser ar y ffordd yng Nghymru. When we entered the field of peace and security, it was largely un-tenanted by women in the formal sense of the talk. We were hoping to facilitate the leadership of women in the areas of peace diplomacy and international affairs. There was a great deal of揍nce among women and the idea was therefore to encourage younger women to enter the field. So how did we do this? Felly, we set ourselves up as a research and proxy initiative, looking primarily both at discourse transformation and also engaging in practice and on the field engagement. And so we saw ourselves as a bridge between policy, the academia and the NGO sectors. And I remember as early as 1998, we actually derived a great deal of inspiration from from Kyla's organization wise in Washington, and it was a true example of sisterhood across borders and boundaries, and I wanted to just acknowledge that because of her presence here today. And we actually talked about gender then as a cross cutting idea, and that was the leach motive of our work. It was really bringing new entrance into the field to interact with senior professionals. It was experience and potential coming together in a non hierarchical space in all our trainings in all our workshops, and so on. We also were particularly conscious that we needed to have men involved. Our approach was intersectional, we brought this intersectional sensibility. And in the South Asian region, you know we are driven by false lines of cars class religion and so on. So this plurality or plurality was very important for our work. And the link between toxic masculinity and cultures of militarism. And therefore it was essential and crucial for us to bring in men to educate them, and to also take them along as partners, because as women we were not going to be ghettoized, we were not only going to speak to so called the soft women's issues. But we would like to offer an alternative paradigm of peace security and development. When we came in. I mean we did have several training workshops between Indians and Pakistanis you know these two countries have been in conflict for so many decades. And I'm happy to share that we have over 500 alumni was still in touch with each other across these seemingly impermeable borders and boundaries. When we started our work we didn't have the luxury of the normative framework of 1325. Although we were working already implicitly with the ideas that 1325 has foregrounded since then. We work with the Beijing platform, a normative framework, and with CEDAW. You have 1325 plus plus, you have the SDGs, and more importantly you have resolution 6569, the first ever resolution that is there to address the role of women in arms control and disarmament. And of course you have the most encouraging PNW, which, you know, according to scrap itself, offers an incredible window of opportunity to change the discourse. But I do want to flag here that both 1325 and 6569 was very much in keeping with the ethos that you wish to promote was piloted in the UN by small countries. 6569 by Trinidad and Tovego, which had its first woman prime minister come in and push the agenda, Kamla Prasad-Beshechir. And in 1325, of course, you know was piloted in the UN by Bangladesh, but it built on the work of so many women's organizations, the world over wills, international of alert women peacemakers program and the whole range of NGO, NGO activity. So today we have an incredible opportunity and especially after the UN resolution 2558 in 2020, that has very clearly linked and established the connection between development, peace security and human rights and sustainable peace. And so we have to now again look at not just not just a word violence, but also the structural causes of conflict exclusions, inclusions and the state, the role of the state itself, especially in the in the global south. And in our own work in generating security, as I said, we tried to build on the two axes of human security. And so our work consequently was attempt to craft an alternative vocabulary provide a new lexicon to counter the male centric militarist discourse on security consciously moving away from ethnocentric anthropocentric even and andro centric notions of security to as a more inclusive empathic understanding of people security away from Westphalia notions of real politic and and approaches of realism. So this opening up this discourse is also about the ability to speak to difference to different to different voices, infusing a kind of pluriversality into this discussion on arms control disarmament security and it's also resting it out of smoke filled rooms filled with men in black suits that that you often refer to in your webinars at scrap. And, and I'd also like to use the word bringing in intelligence and in intelligence is a is a concept that's been offered by Sila Elworthy at the Oxford Research Group, which is talking about a different way of looking at peace, peace and security, moving away from the binaries and the linearities and what is called strategic thinking. We would like to actually move also away from a reductivist approach, which looks at men, men make war and women make peace. No, that's not the way we want to go. We want to understand why women who are in a particular structural framework of our differentials have all of this loaded against them in terms of not finding voice in the issues and the decision making processes where they are most affected as in conflict and in violence. And, and, and there are these processes that undervalue their experience, and therefore we want to foreground them, amplify them reclaiming agency, breaking the silence of women, and the idea is to democratize security and not to securitize democracy. So we, we want to also unscramble the fetishized and reified techno strategic discourse. And so if you want to talk about it we want to humanize it we want to go beyond veterans vocabularies. And we want to use linguistic veterans, like we don't stop using words that obfuscate and confuse like collateral damage strike capacity of missiles, which have always been an area of difference for women, and talk about the real people that are impacted. And we do. And so, the reason I say this is this is in built into our mentoring programs, because you had asked me to speak about what is the structure of our mentoring. We also recognize that we need to open the accordion when we talk about disarmament a bit, and recognize that it's a war on multiple fronts. It's the personal. It's also looking at internal disarmament. So there's a lot of inner work that needs to be done, especially in the peace building field we believe that it's cultural cultures of militarism in South Asia, for example, we had some very powerful women heads of state. And it was very natural to complement them by calling them the only men in their cabinet. Now that tells you what a travesty it is to talk about women in the context of being only men in their cabinet and praising them for that. We also have another strange custom here, that when men are supposed to be less masculinist, we say oh why don't you wear bangles. If you can't get down to being decisive and forceful and powerful, you might as well be bangles. Therefore, devaluing the experiences of women and the inner power they can manifest. Then of course there is the in addition to the cultural there's a whole military economic complex that has to be sort of in a sense exposed. There is the political aspect of disarmament. We have rising populism today we have this is reinforcing jingoism male populist leaders. It's really about, you know, devaluing this in intelligence. And we've seen it in the context of COVID, the securitisation of a huge health tragedy that's going on. So we attempt to change mindset and interrogate why disarmament is only limited to arms control. It's not. It's something much, much wider than that. And which is why I want to also acknowledge here the work of basic in the UK and the University of Birmingham that are trying to move away from this notion of responsible nuclear states to the idea of nuclear responsibilities. I'm moving away from the blame game, trying to build an alternative vocabulary, looking at, you know, securities, security dilemma sensibility to arrive at understanding that linking weapons to security is the wrong way to completely be in. So coming in here, I also want to quickly move to the South Asian women's movements in a sense, because part of the practice that we do in our mentoring is also linking young people to this stream of women's feminist movements, not just women's feminist movements. Now, way before 1325, starting from the 1970s onwards, women in South Asia have been looking at having engaging with a whole gamut of what today is constituted as security issues. You know, earlier, the development world and the security world worked in silos. Thanks to the SDGs, there is a full foregrounding of the link between gender development security and peace. But women in South Asia always worked across these silos. And whether it was in the 70s, you had the Chippco movement, which was something like the green belt belt movement, where you had women protecting the trees from the maraudering corporates that wanted to deforest for for profit. You had women protesting missile sites in the 70s, even before, well, not before. Around the time that the Greenham Commons experience was unfolding, and also the idea was not mainstreaming women's concerns. It was about providing an alternative civics here, not mainstreaming women into a muddy stream, or sort of accepting the meta narratives on international peace and security. I do want to say here, they were, they were picketing nuclear sites. They were opposing large dams that had caused displacement. They were looking at issues of, of right to information, which kept women out of democratic processes. They were the mother's movements in Sri Lanka in, in, in India and across Southern Asia, that were protesting the disappearance of, of soldiers and erstwhile combatants. They were also organizations that were primarily talking about impunity of the armed forces. There was this great dramatic movement of the mothers of Manipur, which is in the northeast of India, that stripped themselves naked in front of the Kangla fort to oppose the whole issue of impunity of the armed forces. And as you know, in the, in South Asia, especially in areas of conflict, women face to armed patriarchy, the, the arms of the militants, as well as, as that of the securitised state. And very often they serve as minesweepers, they serve as shields, military shields and so on. But much of this experience is not visible in the international discourse on peace and security. We would like to visualize that. We would like to say that from South Asia, there are lessons that we can all learn together. If I am and also women are not shall I say afflicted by the cartographic anxieties of nation states, they are able to break build transversal solidarities across borders and boundaries. You know, as women have done between India and Pakistan, even at the height of the cargo post cargo conflict. There was this famous bus for peace, where Indian women went across the border to meet and make peace on the other side. There was a women's action forum in Pakistan that apologize to their sisters in Bangladesh for the excesses that the Pakistani army had committed during their war of independence. There are legions and legions and legions of disobedient women who are crafting a new dialogue, a new vocabulary on peace. I am running out of time, I have a lot more to say, but I do want to point to one particular area, which is the ubiquity of camps. And I think this is something that the government discourse needs to do. If you look at the Rohingya, say example in Cox Bizarre in Bangladesh, it is a metonym for the absolute shredding of human dignity, the absolute dislocation, the inus dehumanizing at its worst, it's awash with arms, it's kind of explicit in dramatically explicit in all types of conflict that proliferate that. So if we want to look at disarmament, we also have to look at this twin axes, this dyad of victimhood and agency and try and claim agency for women. That's one image, the bleak image of the Rohingya camp. The other image is of the women making peace across borders and boundaries. So in negotiating these contradictions is this large piece of peace building. And this is where we want to bring mentorship in for young people, both men and women, to understand the complexities, the struggle of moving from peace, from war and conflict and violence against women, to sustainable, sustained peace. So I just came with that wonderful quote from Walter Ross, he says that the woods were made for the hunters of dreams, the brooks for the fisher of songs, for those who hunt for the gunless game, the streams and the woods belong. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Mi nexio for again such an eye opening and interesting presentation, including speaking about mentoring and training obstacles and opportunities for women across the world and also specifically an injury in South Asia. And also for speaking about the role of feminist perspectives for the future of sustainable disarmament, which of course is as you were speaking includes a need to break down patriarchal power structures and notions of masculinity. I also couldn't agree more with your expert view on how disarmament needs to be considered so much broader and more inclusive and a much more intersectional way, which takes human security to its core. So thank you so much for your presentation. Without further ado, we will move to the Q&A. And I would like to start with a question open to all panelists, which relates back to funding. And it's from a participant. Do you think current funding arrangements encourage turf wars and competition between people and groups who are natural allies. If so, how do you think people and groups can address and overcome this. I was wondering if Kayla would, would you like to start this off this question off. Yes, I mean absolutely I can see my fellow panelists nodding their heads as well I think that this is something that is very prevalent and especially in times of crises or in situations where there is increased conflict or tensions because I was saying that the funding for crises is typically overshadowed or overshadows a lot of work that gender and women led organisations typically work on a lot of these issues and when crises come up they typically overshadow and take funding away from these organisations that are already working on security and development issues. So I think that it definitely leads to turf wars that leads to a lot of people trying to take money from the same small pot of money that exists and I think a solution to that is focusing on promoting women's leadership in especially funding areas but in all decision making spaces and illustrating the importance of a gender perspective in these issues and in areas where there are there is a tendency to lead to these kind of as the attendees as these turf wars and funding for situations where there is more tension or conflict or crises it needs to include funding opportunities for pre existing women led and gender focus organisations to kind of mitigate these turf wars that could exist. Thank you if anyone else want to jump on the question. Okay, there was there was a particular issue that Kyla raised about the stuff was. If you are located in in this in South Asia, for example, and you're working at the grassroots level. The whole structure of international funding is really incomprehensible, because the methodology of putting in a project proposal itself is so intimidating. It's a different language it's a different syntax, and you have to therefore learn it. And then also the reporting mechanisms the log frames and so on, the EU funding is is even more difficult, which is why building solidarities like, for example, why is did for this call. And taking on what is known as a spirit of universal responsibility and recognizing that helping one small initiative is helping women everywhere to look at that. You know to be able to communicate the interconnections after all feminist practices is about connections building connections seeing them where they have been invisibilized in in many parts of South Asia. The governments, nationalist governments are dissuading civil society organizations from accepting funding from what they call foreign sources. They made it extremely difficult, because the reporting the surveillance and the monitoring is so stringent that very often small organizations have to forgo funding, because they just can't keep up the administrative know how that is required for that is almost much more than the amount of energy that you need to spend in in the field. So, I think, building this kind of solidarity. Kyla mentioned UN women. Now even UN women is grappling for funds is is is not flush with funds. And this is happening at a time where in 2019 the spend the global spend on arms was the highest ever in that decade, the highest ever. And in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, the global spend on arms for 4% more than what it was in 2019. So you know where the priorities are going and Kyla very very, very, very definitely pointed to that the conundrum is, how can we come together to raise this as a major major issue. So in addition to just funding also human rights monitors women need protection. How do you provide for that protection. How do you make sure they are safe in the areas, how do you provide insurance for them. How do you look up I mean how do you take care of that keg of in giving functions. How do you ensure that babies can come with them. They come into these spaces. So there is a whole range of issues. Thank you. Thank you so much mean actually Amel. Would you have something to add to that or should we move on to the next question. We cannot hear you at the moment. I don't think we can hear you. What you can do is maybe type your answer in the chat so people can. Is it just me or Nancy do you. I think there's Amel we're struggling to hear you. But if you can type in the chat that would be great. Yeah I think the best possibility would be for you to type your answer in the chat and I'll be more than happy to read it out loud. Also before I move to the next attendees question. Amongst panel is you know as it's eight to just raise your hand or just make me a sign. And you can ask one or the other. Well Kayla just raise the hand. Exactly. So Kayla you can go ahead and then I'll take next the attendees question towards mean actually. I've just so enjoyed hearing from my fellow panelists I've just I feel like this has just been very. For me invigorating to hear and to hopefully move forward on some of these issues so one thing that I was thinking of a lot when I was hearing from our Mel and all of you is that we're looking at this structure. That has been set up and it's almost a traditional security view of how funding and these structures work and you all kind of touch on this at some point but it's. I think speaks to a lot of the questions that have been asked in that are a lot of the points that have been made, and my question for all of you is and I think I think I'm going to ask you just touched on this little bit building that solidarity but how do we game funding in this current system when it's not necessarily set up in the best way for us to gain funding, if that makes sense and how do we. I think one thing that when I see you said that we need to democratize security not securitize democracy and it's I think that was a very good point we need to make sure that we're working together to within the system but my question is how do we work with a system that was not set up with organizations such as ours in mind and with progress towards gender equality and initiatives focusing on a gender perspective in disarmament that weren't set up in this way. I know that's a very big question and probably deserves a separate whole discussion but I'd love to hear all of your insights into this and I think this speaks a little bit to a couple of questions that were proposed in the chat as well. Thank you very much for that also just as you raise your hand I'd like to remind attendees that they can also raise their hand if they want to talk live with us and ask the question. But as I promised earlier I'll take a question that we got from Anna to Dr Minakshi. She's asking with your experience working in peace security and development before resolution 1325. What main differences do you see for women entering in disarmament before and after the implementation of the resolution. Is this for me. Well you know actually what it did what the resolution did do is that it gave us a global normative framework. But having done that, we know that there are some inherent difficulties, especially from the global Southern perspective, that we must make sure that 1325 and its implementation doesn't end up being just a sanitized indicator driven exercise. We have to make sure that civil society is deeply invested in it and that we don't just leave it to the states. And I'll tell you how this happened, for example, countries like India do not have a nap. In South Asia, there are only two countries, Nepal and Afghanistan that have a national action plan. Many of the other countries do not recognize or do not formally accept that they have conflict within the state. Because if you if you implicitly if you acknowledge 1325, you also acknowledge that you have conflict. Now this is one way of getting around and not acknowledging that. So what women's organizations did was that they invoked general resolution. 30, the GR 30 under the sea door. Now these countries have signed on to the sea door in order to foreground the special role for women in situations of conflict. So all I'm really trying to say is that as women and this might answer Kyla's question as well. We have to constantly find creative methodologies to address. Trenchant questions. Now, and, and there is something there is a sort of intuitive link to this collective feminist unconscious. Something like a union collective unconscious where you know women in one part of the world intuitively pick up what their form others have done in other parts of the world. For example, the Greenham Commons women, the women in South Africa who looked into the TRC people who may never have read about them are in some ways replicating those. For example, the farmers movements in India today, where the women where women are in the front lines, the edge of the agitation, they're doing a lot of the things that they form others have done in other parts of the world. There is a collective unconscious that we are dipping into there is a palimpset, and we need to, you know, somehow visualize that. We have to find creative ways about how do we overturn a very conventional method of looking at disarmament, perhaps starting with scrap and this this wonderful group that is here, we could bring out a little charter on what funding should not be doing. And how not to fund, and perhaps is drawing on those experiences, bring out a small little monograph on what we recommend, and then put forward a collective request so for example if someone is looking at small arms in the global south or anywhere else. How do, how do we build those transfers of solidarity so that everybody benefits. I want to also recommend to all of us. There's this fabulous work that is being done by Silla Elworthy, a style Oxford research group. She's brought out this very good book called the business plan for peace. Where she's talked about how planning the funding for peace for the corporates can be a profitable endeavor. And to suggest that there is sense in investing in peace. And I mean, if you can bring Silla to your conversations, she would really laid out and perhaps that is a kind of plan that we can all use collectively instead of reinventing the wheel. I don't know Kyla, if I've answered your question, but you raised such an important issue. It's a long struggle. The battle for freedom is never done and the field is never quiet. Thank you. Meenakshi and Kayla for posing the question. We've just learned so much from from both of you with the question and the answers. So thank you. We managed to speak with Sohair, our other panellist via WhatsApp. Unfortunately, as Sohair has mentioned, she has technical issues, which is why unfortunately she's not able to join live with us. But we did pose a question to Sohair and we think it's important to share her answer. We also heard that according to her presentation, how she talked about how women have a particular analysis which is important. And is needed to raise awareness of the impact of weapons in their communities in, for example, in Sudan, and also at the government level. And we asked Sohair if she could develop and how these interactions is received at the government levels that she works with. And if there is any support from government organisations or also civil society organisations in Sudan or across the region to help with funding obstacles or practical obstacles that Sohair has spoken about and also all of the panellists have spoken about today. So I'll just read her answer. She answered to us that the government institutions are supposed to support women and their communities. An example of that is Sudan Commission for DDR and Ministry of Social Welfare. But it seems not a priority in many ways. The alternative for that is local leaders who support our work and other civil society bodies. Also due to limited funds for women and for women, disarmament is not a priority for the government. But still, the awareness and capacity building activity can be afforded by internal funding and cooperation between different stakeholders and partner. She believes the social media is a good alternative to share and disseminate message on disarmament and peace issues to different segments of society. As she mentioned in the presentation, the funding theme in many cases do not meet the goal and needs for their communities. Great. I would also like we also similarly posed a question to Armel on WhatsApp. So if I just read the question out that we asked Armel and even or will provide the answer as well. We asked Armel according to her presentation that she spoke about the political challenges again and the barriers to Wilf Cameroon's work, especially with regards to funding restrictions and also the lack of national acknowledgement for the work that Wilf Cameroon do. And we asked Armel how do you try to overcome these challenges. She mentioned in her presentation that she worked with the media, but we asked what were the challenges here because of the rather harsh political stance. And if Armel has any insights as to whether these issues are more prevalent and serious for women led organisations, or if in fact it's just a national problem for all NGOs and civil society organisations working in disarmament in Cameroon. So she gave us multiple answers for that. First she liked to say that the first strategy they adopted in the face of lack of support in the action, they were directly with community. The actions are directed towards them and then no longer have to go through intermediaries. The second thing that they are fortunate enough is that the media is supportive of their cause and support and support their initiative. Generally, do you when as they raise through the media helps them thrive. However, she also would like to point out that the media hardly accompanies them in their actions because they are influenced by the government. And finally, she believes that very few CSOs in Cameroon work in the field of arms control. They practically are the only CSO of women really engaged in the field. Also the challenges they face are very much inherent to them as wealth Cameroon and not a global problem. This is why they struggle to mobilise the fund that are granted of the results they produce and the impact of the action. Great. Now we are running out of time so we would like just to pose a final question to Minakshi and Kayla and Seherna Amel if you are able to join. But do you have any hope for the future with funding and with the obstacles that we have spoken about in this webinar if we could ask just for a quick one, two minute response to this question so we can wrap up in time for half past. Thank you. Kayla, beauty before age. I don't think that I quite qualify for that, but thank you, that's very kind. I would like to say I just, again, thank you so much for having me. This has been a very great conversation and I think there's been some beautiful responses to the questions, both virtually and through text and also on this video as well. I'd like to just say that I think that there is hope. I think that the past few years and especially the past five, 10, 15, 20 years gives rise to hope and I think without having hope that we should not be in this line of work either. We also have seen a lot of improvements and progress and changes slow, but it's steady. And I think that one thing that we should hold on to is that accountability does go a long way for specifically in this area for quality continued funding. I think a couple of things that can be improved with that is that we need to focus on including training on digital reporting, including data training and working to track where the money goes to show funders what's being done and why more and better and continuous funding is necessary. And I think that one of the ways that can be done as Menashki, so eloquently put it, was solidarity across sectors across organizations and working together on that way. And another way I think is a great way to show accountability is, as I mentioned earlier, the scorecard countries and organizations and groups of people do not necessarily like to be ranked or scored lower. If they are called out on that, it's, I think, a great way. The white scorecard I mentioned earlier is a great example of this when we published it. We sent it to all the think tanks that we were rating on how many women were on their board of directors or looking at the gender parity there and one immediately within hours reached out to us and let us know they had just added one more woman to their board of directors. So it goes a long way to show the numbers and show what's going on, but I think that needs to be paired equally, if not less so less important than the solidarity that Menashki was talking about so accountability and solidarity are the two things that lend us hope in this area. Absolutely, there has to be hope, that's what propels us. Let me share with you, you know, from initially being the last speaker on the last panel on any seminar on peace security and disarmament, we gradually inched our way up, we're now calling women to panels on security has become almost deregur. So that's, that's, you know, that's a great thing. The other aspect is that we really need to know, you know, sort of visible lies that are daily resistances and everyday mutinies against patriarchy and the, you know, the violence of family community and the state and the complicities between them is always a step forward. Look at where we were 20 years ago and look at the fact that now young people like those who populate scrap are actually leading this discourse and that is so encouraging so so so encouraging. So we, we first of all shed the earlier image of women building peace as the woman in white passively holy or holy passive right. We've already come a long way since then. And, and I think like Kyla, and in the hands of people like Kyla Nancy ever more and on the scrap team. There's so much potential. You're talking about opening up conversations just having conversations and conversations and conversations will reach that critical mass, where there will be a paradigm shift. A democratised democratised democratised security. Bring it into the heat and dust of subaltern aspirations out of those smoke filled rooms out of those closed doors. And of course there's otherwise we should, we should all just hang up our coats and go home, which we're not doing. And women will never. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Kyla. I think we'll have to call it here unfortunately, which is a shame because it's been such a great conversation there's so much more to discuss, but I'm sorry to interrupt you Nancy I'm really sorry. I just so Sue her raise her hand and I think she wanted to say something. So, yes. Hello. On this question I'm sorry to interrupt. Yes. Absolutely please. Yeah. Thank you very much for presenting my speech. I'm very sorry for this technical. I disappointed to not to join. It seems it's very distinguished talk from the other participant. I think I can, I can watch it in the YouTube. Is it, is it be available. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. This is great. Yeah, you, you, you shed lights on the how to come you cooperate and can coordinate to, to find other board units for, for funding for disarmament. And this is, this is for me is very brilliant. I will give them touch and they will try to attend maybe another time. Thank you, Ivan. Thank you Nancy and other participants. Thank you. Thank you for that. This is the end now but we do have two other webinars in our feminist disarmament webinar series so please check out our website for details on this and thank you everyone for attending we hope you enjoyed the discussion as much as we did. And of course, a huge thank you to our four panellists. Kayla mean actually so her and our male. Thank you everyone.