Grassroots women’s leadership is important if representative democracies are to include citizen participation beyond simply voting in elections. This study from Gender and Development examines an approach, developed by the Huairou Commission and GROOTS International, that helps grassroots women organise as leaders and engage with local government to achieve change in their communities. The success of the Local to Local Dialogue approach in Uganda, Kenya and Russia reflects the importance of organised groups of women having autonomous space, where they can progress to being recognised as community leaders, whose views are listened to and acted upon by the government.
GROOTS International is a global network of grassroots women’s organisations set up to exchange skills and knowledge among peers to improve local development practices. The Huairou Commission is a broader coalition linking grassroots women’s networks to each other and to institutional partners, particularly to provide an organised women’s voice within dialogues on human settlements.
In 2002, seeing the value of the Local to Local Dialogue approach, which was first developed in Asia, the Huairou Commission facilitated a pilot project for six of its member organisations in Argentina, Czech Republic, Kenya, Tanzania, Russia and Uganda, in which they adapted the idea of Local to Local Dialogues for use in their own contexts. Since then, other organisations have begun to use the Local to Local model as a basis for participation in local and national governance but, as yet, the Local to Local approach has not been developed on a large scale.
Nevertheless, three of the original organisations in Kenya, Russia and Uganda have successfully replicated the model across their countries. Their experience shows that it is the process of self-organising among poor women that provides the base for their political activity. In these countries, women’s groups:
- create and claim a political space of their own initiative in communities where local government has not developed adequate invited spaces for deeper political participation;
- seek to break down problematic habits of relating between government officials and citizens, confronting the power-laden modes of interaction that are commonplace;
- do not focus their political action on a particular issue, or take an adversarial role, but engage with local authorities to satisfy a variety of needs and in order to have an ongoing relationship with their government; and
- seek mutual understanding and ongoing partnership with their local governments, so that local authorities begin to see them as agents with potential contributions, with whom it is in the authorities’ best interests to collaborate.
Women’s leadership, from the first organising steps through the entire Local to Local Dialogues process, empowers women with the ability to influence local decisions and resource allocation, as well as contributing more generally to the deepening of democracy.
- This deepening is much needed in order to move beyond obstacles such as patronage in Uganda, or the limitations of strict hierarchies and resistance to collective action in Russia.
- The women demonstrate a new kind of leadership that brings results by establishing ongoing relationships with the government, rather than posing as adversaries.
- The Local to Local Dialogue process ensures that government bodies are accountable to citizens.
- Currently, there is a challenge to women’s organisations and to women’s political participation in particular, as governments and development donors shift their focus away from supporting social movements and organising.
