Global Policy Forum

By Mutsumi Shirai

In Uganda, to escape from domestic violence, a 27-year-old woman left her husband and moved back with her mother for protection. In spite of her complaint, a local authority decided to take no action and encouraged her to return to her husband. Several weeks after the separation, the husband stabbed her mother and younger sister to death. For months after this incident, the local authorities did not charge him with the killing. Although this sounds all too familiar, after the World Organization Against Torture's (OMCT) Women's Rights Programme appealed for justice to this case and caught widespread attention, the husband was tried and convicted.

This is only one of dozens of programs that are funded through the Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women, established at the Untied Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The fund was created by the UN General Assembly in respond to the urgent call for action to end violence against women that emanated from the Beijing Conference. The goals of the Trust Fund are to identify and support innovative projects aimed specifically at preventing and eliminating violence against women around the world.

According to the UNIFEM's report on August 15, 2000, at the 5th UN inter-agency meeting, the Trust Fund distributed grants ranging from $25,000 to $ 130,000 each, totaling $1 million to 17 programs in 21 countries. The fund will be used to support such programs as raising awareness for sexual harassment in university system in Croatia; training judges to decide cases involving discrimination and violence against women, and other issues including domestic violence, forced prostitution and so-called "honor killings."

This year alone, the Trust Fund received close to 200 proposals with funding of $12.5 million. "There is an obvious and growing need for greater funding in the area of violence prevention. Our biggest obstacle is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of resources," according to Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Director of UNIFEM. Since the creation of the Trust Fund, UNIFEM has gained extensive knowledge about the effective projects and interventions to address violence against women. The agency is hoping to share this knowledge within the UN system, governments, NGOs and women's and human rights groups.

"We are trying to enlighten people who can then spread the message among their colleagues and peers," says Fatoumata Sire Diakite, the president of the Association pour le Progres et la Defense des Droits des Femmes Maliennes (APDF), whose awareness-raising workshop for female genital mutilation (FGM) was supported by the Trust Fund. Diakite has been working with a group of FGM practitioners and helping them to understand the life-threatening consequences of FGM practices. The workshop was designed to educate FGM practitioners through exposing them to experienced-based stories, such as mothers who lost their daughters from post-FGM complications, and medical doctors who witnessed babies' deaths during deliveries which are associated with FGM. Her organization also helps to find a new vocation such as making soap or dying clothes for those practitioners whose livelihood rely solely on the income from the FGM practices. At the end of the workshop, Diakite says, 43 practitioners gave up the practice.

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