In this workshop there were 6 presenters, Ms Abha Bahaiya from India, Ms Outhaki Khamphoui from Laos, Ms Samya Nasser, a Palestinian from Israel, Ms Anoja Wickramasinghe from Sri Lanka, Ms Helena Asamoah-Hassan from Ghana, Ms Lynda Forrest from Australia. There was also an open forum. From the presentations of Ms Samya Nasser, Ms Anoja Wickramasinghe and Ms Helena Asamoah-Hassan, papers are available. Therefore their presentations will not be in these minutes.

Ms Abha Bahaiya from Jagori, Women's Training, Documentation and Communication Centre - New Delhi
Jagori is a feminist documentation, training and communication resource centre that started in 1983. The main objectives of the centre is to spread feminist consciousness to urban and rural women's groups, build campaigns, conduct training programmes and workshops, do documentation and dissemination of information to nearly 150 groups that we network with. Since our primary reach out is to women who do not have reading nor writing skills, we use multi-media communication means. We have written hundreds of feminist songs, street plays, posters and we held exhibitions to celebrate our strength and protest, to challenge state policies and to share new information and highlight women's traditional knowledge and skills.
In this presentation, I will first try to deconstruct some of the terms that we are using in this conference in a rather uncritical way. Secondly, I will elaborate some of the basic principles of mutual learning and training and finally I will elaborate on some examples of how we conduct our training.
Deconstructions Firstly, it is important that illiteracy is not seen as synonymous to lack of education or knowledge. In the global technological paradigm today, illiterate people are blamed for their 'poor' nations. Iliterate people should not be seen as stupid and incapable of rational decision making. Of course literacy is of paramount importance for women; I am not propogating illiteracy, but merely challenging the dominant perception of the poor. I am also challenging the perception that educational processes can be reduced to the limited objective of making people literate.
Secondly, learning, education and information building are not value neutral agendas. In this conference it has frequently been said that information is power, but I would like to emphasise that mere information in itself is not power. Unless information is accompanied by a critical worldview, information does have the power to change reality or strengthen people's bargaining power.
This brings me to the third notion, the notion of empowerment. Empowerment is either simple, nor linear. Empowerment contains the implicit assumption that people are powerless and victims of their own circumstances. Talking about empowerment enforces reinforces the stereotypes and gives our class an immense power who decide to empower others.

Basic principles of mutual learning

1. An implicit belief in people's capacity to comprehend and change their reality

2. Gender relations is central to our analysis

3. We do not belief in objective truth. Our experiences are subjective, biased and informed by our political perspective

4. We do not belief in the division between private and political domains.

5. Learning takes place not only at the rational, but also at the emotional level.

6. Starting from what people know

7. There should be a non-threatening environment in the training

8. We have a commitment to ask why

Training We do not give one day training, as we belief training to be a process which cannot be done in one day. Our trainings vary from 7 days to one month. We do not make manuals, we only commit to a process of learning. We begin with for example what was the first experience of being a woman. Then we talk about memories of anger and opposition. We think that feelings are not merely individual, but part of the patriarchal structure. We do a lot of work around body and sexuality e.g. body mapping in which women indicate the areas of pain and pleasure. Sometimes we introduce literacy in this process, for example when talking about organs. We do health-, legal- and economic literacy projects. On that base we build our information and knowledge.

Ms Outhaki Khamphoui, from the Gender and Information Resource Centre in Laos The work of gender and development has gained more attention of the Laos government in the late eighties. The concept of gender was only introduced into the country, just before the Beijing conference in 1995. Consequently the need for more and better information about the roles of men and women was identified. This resulted in the establishment of the information centre.
The Laos Women's Union, that has 600,000 members is closely linked to the centre. The Union represents the interests of all women. In the past, education was done according to the governments' directions. Since 1995 there exists special attention for women's information. NGOs give support for this. Another objective is to promote the status of women. The information centre aims to obtain gender information and mainstream this information for policy. They try to raise awareness among senior ranking officials about gender issues. This is important because these officials are the catalysts for all developments in the country.
The information centre also aims at the inclusion of gender specific data in National Statistics through co-operation with the National Statistics Office. They also aim to conduct surveys and collect information, and use fundraising for gender. Now there is a library with about 700 books in English, but most women do speak another language and many are illiterate. Therefore they use audio-visual means to communicate with them. They have developed a whole range of pictures with activities in which the gender of the person who performs those activities cannot be seen. These pictures are used to enhance discussion about the gender division of labour, stereo-types and potential changes in it. They also included the activities of different minorities to challenge stereo-types about them.

Questions and remarks
We should have our own information What is the information we need to empower women?
There are so many practical gender needs in India, then why does your (Ms Abha) organisation focus on gender awareness raising?
I refuse to make a distinction between strategic and practical gender needs, because I believe this is an artificial distinction. For example water is both a strategic and practical need. Of course we do deal with the issues that concern the women that we work with. We discuss the rights to forest produce, and this is related to how to create the collective strength to bargain with the forester and to prevent sexual abuse by him. Therefore it is questionable who decides what is basic or not basic needs. I am the only black women with a non-English speaking background in my library. My aim is both to provide information for minority groups and to make the library accessible for them. How do we make the information systems that we're setting up accessible to minority groups, especially if we face within our own institutions limitations for example with colleagues? It is important to acknowledge that power is always among us. There are no power-free relations, even within our own institutions. The Jagori organisation is an NGO, but they work as a collective. They use information from other centres and sources in India and adapt this information for their our purpose. This is mainly making it accessible for example through pictures. The organisation has a fairly big own documentation centre. The information centre in Laos uses the same principles of audio-visual communication and adapts information from other sources for their purpose. Illiteracy about their own body does not only occur among rural women in India, but also among women in the VS. Similar principles of audio-visual education are used there. In Africa the radio is very important for communication. I wonder whether this conference does not give to much attention to new information technologies at the expense of attention for pictures, movies, radio and other non-written means of communication. These means might deserve much more relevant to discuss here.

"A picture is worth a thousand words"

Call for solidarity and consciousness:
a female social worker in Chili who is Mapucha, was brutally aggressed by the mayor when she demanded labour rights. There is very little attention for minority and migrant women in this workshop. For example the problem of making information accessible and available for and about migrant women in Europe. The Mapping the World exercise is also limited in that sense. The problem of under representation is an enormous complex problem, in particular in countries where there are many different etnicities. How do we think that rural women can access the internet? There is a lot of distance, only elite can do this, there is a language problem. The rural communities in Bolivia have always been managed by the elite. Which alternatives are available for rural women who have to walk 5-6 hours to the nearest city. We need alternative ways of disseminating information

Lynda Forrest from Women's Information Service - office for the Status of Women The title of the presentation is Multicultural Women's Writing. Australia-wide: all states have different information services for women, some services are federally funded and some state funded, many services have a combination of state and federal funding.
The Women's Studies Resource Centre was established in 1995. We have comprehensive women's health services which are located in different geographic regions and within these there are information collections. There is also information about lesbian and gay issues, on labour issues and general information about women's issues. There is a specialist collection on issues relating to HIV/AIDS. The Centre has a women's show on the community radio that spreads information. There are a number of websites. Many librarians are women, but we cannot assume that this works in favour of finding women focussed information and literature in our libraries. A strong sense of "fairness" leads to women focused material, particularly of controversial kind or a radical kind to be omitted from collections.
The general argument used is that libraries are mainstream and therefore the collections should reflect this. What does it mean? Women's issues are not mainstream or that we prefer to stay away from controversy. For example, it is know that girls read more than boys, yet in children literature the most exciting acts are still the prerogative of boys. It is difficult to get strong girl heroes from children's books. In Australia the term multicultural reflects our society, but the anglo-celtic culture is the dominant culture and English the official language.
In 1970 the government adopted the policy of multiculturalism under pressure of the interest groups. This reflecting the growing strength of migrant people, especially of the second generation, who were gaining positions of power. However, this was not reflected in the literature we find in the libraries. Though there are many migrant names in the catalogue, these are only writers who have "literal merit" as defined by the anglo-celtic culture. The contents of their books does not reflect the migrants' reality. In the library I work we focus on educational materials that assist the learners of English as a second language and also in the provision of culturally diverse materials. However, reading writers from diverse cultural backgrounds for pleasure is not a general practice in mainstream areas.
People do not want to read something that is hard to grasp. How will we ever achieve the integration of understanding that our government legislates for, we vote for and support if the effort to understand these writings is too challenging! For those writers whose ethnicity is reflected not only in their stories, but in every phrase they write, acceptance is very difficult. Often these writers publish their work themselves. Our library will continue to have a place and a role in promoting such literature, until we see the stories of and by women of non-English speaking backgrounds being published by mainstream press and on the library shelves.

Questions and Remarks

The way in which women participate in the mothers' school in the Palestinian community in Israel is not merely instrumental in the education of their children. It also enables them to come outside their own houses, as 80% of the Palestinian women does not work outside the house. In the Palestinian society we are far away from speaking about equity, but this is the first step. The gender issue is very complex in our society. Arab children may go to Jewish school but they won't because then they will not be able to write Arab. How can we overcome the gap between the rural and the elite population in South America with respect to new information technology?
Indigenous organisations should be reinforced, in order that they can find this information and translate it for the people. Of course they should be very selective in which information to use and to share. On the one hand new technology has a homogenising tendency and we want to communicate with each other. While on the other hand we want to preserve the diversity of languages and religions over the world. Therefore we should give more attention to the development of alternative ways of communicating. In addition to this, internet has speeded up conversation, which threatens the preservation of diversity because it limits the possibilities for mediation and intervention.
The situation in Laos is similar to the situation in Bolivia. Our centre tries to adapt information of high levels to the grassroots level. We emphasise minority communities, adapt knowledge, explore their knowledge and think about change. Empowering knowledge for women and men must be aiming at change.
Furthermore we believe it is not useful to work with women alone, therefore we also work with men. They must also change and understand the benefits of their wives being partners in development. Similarly, they must understand the importance of female participation in community organisations.
At the moment it is not realistic to talk about the access of rural people to the internet. There are proposals to write the appropriate software (less text-based), but that will not be enough due to costs and power differences. In particular talking about rural indigenous women, they'll always come second after their husbands. Therefore we should talk about realistic objectives, for example about having our information centres that can adapt and provide all kinds of information we need.
There are limitations to internet. It cannot express spirituality. In Australia, children in small remote communities receive their education through the radio. It takes very little to set up such a radio and it is very important.