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Indonesia’s Ministry of Women Empowerment (MOWE) is the national government agency tasked with promoting and protecting women’s rights. The organization monitors state obligations to CEDAW, and works to implement the provisions of the Convention, the Beijing Platform for Action and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) through promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment in the government’s policies and programmes.
MOWE is also responsible for gender mainstreaming throughout the government, since a presidential decree in 2000 stipulated that all government representatives and agencies mainstream gender in their policies, programmes and budgets to eliminate gender discrimination.
Ibu Sri Danti is the youngest of five Deputy Directors at MOWE, and chiefly in charge of gender mainstreaming. Quick-witted and dynamic, she is known as a go-getter by her peers, and someone not afraid to speak her mind. This has helped her she says, because in her job, she has to spend a lot of her time ‘preaching’.
“Unless gender equality is institutionalized, internalized within all the government structures, we will not see much improvement in ending discrimination against women,” she says. “And to internalize gender equality, we need to sensitize people about gender, about women’s rights, which is why I’m always preaching,” she laughs.
She says the level of gender-sensitivity in government agencies in Indonesia is poor, and not just among men. Many women are just as clueless about equality and women’s empowerment because of the effects of ‘living in a patriarchal society’. Others who are already empowered, like many of her friends she says, don’t really understand the problems other women face, and don’t really feel the need to empower others.
Since assuming her role at MOWE, Ibu Danti has been busy working with the gender focal points and gender working groups within each of the ministries to implement a National Action Plan on Gender Mainstreaming, which derives from the 2000 presidential decree. She also works with officials and administrators at the provincial and district levels, which must establish Women Empowerment Bureaus or Offices to facilitate programmes and policies to promote gender equality, all of which they must also adequately budget for.
The process of creating such bureaus or offices has not been uniform, and their status and mandates vary, leading to different policy priorities and resource allocations. Many are not more than a desk with one junior female staffer with limited or no decision-making powers. The challenge here is that it is often difficult to convince local officials of the need for such ‘gender entities’ says Ibu Danti, because they either will not admit there is discrimination against women, or they may simply be unaware about women’s rights issues, about CEDAW and the state’s obligations, and about the content of new anti-discrimination legislation or amended laws promulgated at the federal level.
“So a lot of our work involves information dissemination on women’s rights, and training on CEDAW principles and how to integrate this in local policy-making,” she said. “For example, we have now translated the CEDAW Committee’s Concluding Observations and are using this in the training.”
She says that several provinces have created women’s studies centers that are attached to local tertiary institutions. She works closely with these centers, and also with local NGOs to conduct the training. She is quick to stress the important role of NGOs in raising awareness about anti-discrimination and promoting women’s rights, particularly at the local levels – “they are in touch with the situation on the ground. We work closely with them, because otherwise we won’t get anything done.”
Ibu Danti has had a bee in her bonnet for some time now on an issue that is especially important to her and something she hopes will be re-visited in the near future. Three years ago, a Gender Equality Law was drafted, but then quickly shelved after too many people found it controversial.
Recently, she attended an ASEAN High-Level meeting on the CEDAW reporting process in Laos, supported by UNIFEM, where countries shared their experiences and strategies for meeting their obligations to the Convention. There, she learned about the gender equality legislation of other countries that had been passed or were pending adoption, like in Vietnam and the Philippines. Now, she’s curious to see if the process can be revived in her country, because the law, she says, would be a huge boost to implementation of CEDAW in Indonesia.
(January 2008)
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CEDAW Champion – Ibu Sri Danti, Deputy for