|
Siriporn Panyasen, now in her 40s, has been working in local government for almost 3 decades. She works for her tambon, or subdistrict, as chief of the Tambon Administrative Organisation (TAO), the local authority which oversees close to 10 villages. Thailand has over 7,000 tambons, local government units spread across the country that are further subdivided into about 70,000 villages.
From a poor family, Siriporn had to leave school at age 14 to earn a living to take care of her siblings. She worked as a dishwasher, a cook and a charcoal seller, finding time to also become a community volunteer at the age of 19. Volunteering slowly led to a position in the village council and then to the role of assistant village head 1. With the help of a sympathetic teacher, Siriporn says she was able to continue with an ‘informal education’ all this while, which helped her immensely with her work.
She rose through the ranks from the village to the tambon level, to eventually become assistant to the head of the tambon. And then ten years ago, Siriporn was elected as tambon chief. She is one of a very small group of women in a decision-making position within the local government structure. “There are 22 council members who are responsible for all the decisions and only 4 are women, including me,” she said.
In all her years working in the tambon, she says one issue has always been a concern – not enough women participate in local politics or public life. The absence of women according to her is not only because of entrenched gender stereotypes that believe a woman’s place is in the home, but also because women have many responsibilities that often simply do not afford them the time to be active in public life. “Most women who enter this kind of work or who volunteer in the community have families who let them do it. If their husbands don’t allow it, they can’t.”
Since assuming her role as chief of the tambon, Siriporn has made it a personal goal to encourage more women to get involved in local governance. As the head also of WAY Lampang, a women and youth development association, and the chair of a loose NGO network that focuses on women and governance, she uses all her many hats to push the cause.
“I believe at least 80% of women leaders actually focus on women’s empowerment, so how can we promote gender equality if we don’t have any women leaders?” she says.
In 2006, Siriporn joined a national workshop supported by UNIFEM in her district that was training trainers on local governance and women’s participation. The workshop was a precursor to several others that were meant to encourage women to participate in their upcoming Tambon Administrative Organization (TAO) elections held from September-October 2007 in about 600 tambons nationwide.
Siriporn signed on as a trainer, focusing on gender-responsive governance, especially targeted at potential women candidates. Trainers went out to targeted provinces in each region, reaching out to over 3,200 women 2, educating them on election campaigning, local governance and administrative structures, and also the skills required to be an effective leader should they win the election. “We trained women on such things as how to introduce their policies in public, how to use the media, on campaign finance reporting, and also looked at the problems they might face during their campaigns,” she said.
She smiles when asked what some of these problems might be. She said that women running for election generally face ‘a lot of complaining’ and ‘a lot of blocking’. “For example, many male village elders would complain that women candidates were going against the rules. In one village, the headman actually barred female candidates from campaigning in the village public space, saying it was not allowed. But we had already trained the women on what to expect, and what their campaigning rights were, so they went ahead anyway and ignored him.”
“We had to teach a lot of tactics, such as using loud hailers, putting posters up in certain areas where they couldn’t easily be torn down, and even how to deal with people who tried to discredit you or your family.” She herself faced a number of ‘dirty tricks’ when she stood for election, including having her car tyres regularly punctured so she couldn’t easily travel to campaign.
According to Siriporn, CEDAW was slowly introduced at workshops as the training progressed – it was a difficult concept to grasp at first and tough to convey at the grassroots level. “But as it became clearer, we realized how important and useful it was to our work, and how it helped to justify what we were saying about gender equality. We learned that the government, at both the national and local levels, was obliged to abide by the Convention, that CEDAW is an international standard that we can use to back up our local legislation – this gave us a lot of confidence,” she said.
In 2006, recommendations by the CEDAW Committee to Thailand to adopt temporary special measures to increase women’s participation in politics prompted action by the government and women’s NGOs. Various activities were carried out nation-wide to promote quotas for women, to raise awareness among candidates, political parties and voters of the importance of women’s involvement in public life.
Siriporn, through her organization WAY Lampang, conducted several of these activities at the tambon, district, provincial and regional levels, and worked with partners to develop training modules and materials on gender-responsive leadership integrated with the CEDAW framework and CEDAW principles. Activities have included on-call technical support, knowledge sharing workshops for newly elected women in local government units and field visits. In January 2008, the very first training that fully integrated CEDAW into local government working processes was conducted for over 200 newly elected tambon administrative council members. This has since been expanded to 360 more women leaders with many more in the pipeline. ‘Training of trainers’ sessions are also underway especially aimed at promoting hill tribe women’s participation in local politics.
“I’m not interested in working on CEDAW as a ‘fashion’, or because of ‘funding’,” she says. “I truly believe that it needs to be embedded in people’s beliefs, both men’s and women’s.”
She says that she spent a lot of time thinking about numbers in the early years of her term – how to get more women to participate. Now, after knowing about CEDAW, she knows that it is not just quantity, but quality that is important. If we don’t ingrain CEDAW principles in women’s attitudes, they will not understand that they have the power to change things, to make things better. Knowing about CEDAW will also help women leaders use the power they have wisely and fairly.
She says that there has been progress in her tambon, and in others she has observed that have female leadership. Because of affirmative action, many village committees in her tambon now must include an equal number of women, many youth programmes now include as many boys as girls, and education scholarships are given to an equal number of boys and girls. There is much less ‘gender division of labour’ in local institutions – in the past, it was common for example, for female officials to be expected to do the cooking, prepare the logistics, and serve guests at official events and functions – this happens much less now.
Siriporn is keen to continue doing what she is doing, and she is ambitious. After her current term ends in mid- 2008, she intends to run again for a tambon administrative position, and then eventually to run for senator of Lampang province. A political party has already tried to co-opt her into its ranks she says, “but I told them it was a bit too early,” she smiles, “I still have work to do here.”
(May 2008)
1. Village and tambon heads are elected positions at the sub-district level within the regional administration under the Ministry of the Interior. 2. Out of 3,206 women trained, with the support of UNIFEM and the Office of Women’s Affairs and Family Development (OWAFD), 62 percent (2,011) decided to run in the elections as members of theTAO Council. 44 percent (887) of them were elected, making up 56 percent of the total number of women elected. However, when compared to the total number of elected members of TAOs (9,362), women accounted for 14 percent only.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
CEDAW CHAMPION – Siriporn Panyasen, Head