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Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 1
(13 of 16 pages)
Frank Loy: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you, Mr. President. Many ideas were being expressed by my colleagues, so I'm just going to
summarize by saying that the democracy must be legitimate. The emerging democracies, there is a silent majority.
Men or women. And of course the women. And they are lack of informations and of autonomy. There are many mature
democracies who are not, they have not real democracies. Like letting countries, but here the women can express
herself and she can the information she needs. Mr. President, the division of the labor is very, very old. So woman
has to be at home and of course they say that they have thousand of arms and they have to raise the children and
that is old, but now there is an evolution. So now the woman has a role and she is a real citizen in our emerging
democracies. So what have to do in Benin? We have think though that the school is essential. So it's free. The
school is free. And of course the state has, the NGOs are very useful and of course because of the lack of resources,
financial resources and human resources, we have many problems and we are signing many protocols with NGOs.
There are 50 NGOs in our country. And they have rights and they have of course obligations and they have results.
But they have to be independent. This is very important. But the struggle is fierce for the women and in the political
parties, because they are not ready for that. But what can we do for this silent majority? For she can participate
to the real power and be more human and more equilibrium. And we want her to participate more than that, so we
have to look for a way. Thank you Mr. President.
Frank Loy: From Nepal.
Speaker: Mrs. Kaniri has already made presentation on the situation of Nepal, but I would like to make some
comments on the NGOs in Nepal. People in Nepal have this disillusionment towards both the government and the NGOs
and it's because that most of the NGOs in Nepal are politically divided and we know that certain NGOs affiliated
to the rightist party and the [inaudible] to the leftist party. So what happens is that in their own composition,
they are introducing same kinds of programs in the villages all for the women also and so we have lots of duplicate
programs without much result.
And the next one is that most of the NGOs are only advocating donor's concept. Like in 1995, in Nepal we don't
have the women, daughters do not have right to parental property and its only the sons who get it, but suddenly
the donors decided that even the daughters should have the right to parental property. And all the NGOs were advocating
this right for parental property and the bill was also tabled in the parliament in the 11th session and it's been
16 session of the parliament and nothing has gone forward. So what happened is that even in the five sessions of
the parliament, the bill has been dropped because we had recent election in last May, so nothing has been really
done for the women's involvement and when there was donor money, everyone was advocating it. And now there's not
much money, no one is doing anything.
So the people really are not very happy with the NGOs. And in fact what I think is that they are not really helping
in development, development process or in strengthening democracy in their way. And Mrs. K has mentioned that the
recent women, in the women ministry does not have a woman minister, and it's a man minister. And what I would like
to say that even having a woman in the woman ministry doesn't really help the women scores. We had earlier women
ministers, but in fact I'm sorry to say that they have done nothing for women in parliament except for some inner
holding some seminars or programs here and there. They have not done any concrete programs for women. And I think
it is better to have a gender sensitive man in the women's minister, than a woman who is not sincere to a woman's
scores. And here Mrs. K has said that the media has negative attitude towards NGOs. I would like to say that we
had really promoted women's scores and other causes, we have carried news stories on the good things that the NGOs.
It is only when basically complement the media that the NGOs are not really transparent. So that is all I would
like to say.
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