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Introducing CEDAW to Civil Servants

	Olga, a trainer at the National Institute of Public Administration (Photograph by Jesse Wright)

Like many Asian countries, Timor-Leste has a long history of patriarchy. Throughout most of the country women are still married with a bride price brokered between male relatives. From childhood, daughters and sons are taught that there are women's tasks and there are men's tasks - these distinctions laid down inside the home both create and perpetuate gender stereotypes between boys and girls, resulting in pervasive gender inequalities, and discrimination against women.. But Olga Olga is trying to change all that.

 

Olga has been a trainer at the National Institute of Public Administration (INAP) since 2004. INAP was developed as a training institution for civil servants and offers courses on various aspects of the government administration, leadership, problem solving and communication. However, despite progress in these areas, some government employees were still slow to progress in another area: gender equality.

 

Since 2006 Olga, through her role at INAP, has been promoting CEDAW, the international convention on women's human rights. She joined a UNIFEM-supported project to integrate CEDAW into the INAP training courses because the idea of promoting women's rights in Timor was too important to ignore.. “I like CEDAW because this international treaty is focused on protecting women's rights,” Olga said. “Through CEDAW, we can achieve equal rights for both men and women, and remove gender discrimination in the political, economic and cultural arenas.” When the CEDAW initiative started, Olga began with basic issues, such as training civil servants about the country's problem with domestic violence.

 

In 2006 Olga and her colleagues attended a workshop on CEDAW training module development in the Philippines. There they met delegations from seven other countries in the region, each presenting their own country plan. The trip inspired Olga to design a curriculum which would help civil servants understand gender equality in a broader sense, but as applied within a Timor-Leste context. “We came back from the Philippines and we worked more on our country model based on recommendations from UNIFEM” Olga said.

In 2007 she led a small team at INAP into the districts to pilot teach the curriculum they had created. Olga traveled to Liquisa in the west, Ainaro in the south and Lospalos, far east of Dili and introduced new ideas she says she hopes will change some minds.

 

She said the trainings were often an uphill task, partly because the government's hiring system itself tends to favor men. “The majority of civil servants are men. According to the law, anyone who makes the cut can be a civil servant, but in reality there are way more men than women civil servants.” Her job was made more difficult because many male students were not keen to learn from a female. But Olga said that she doesn't take any disrespect from her students—male or female. “When I stand at the head of the class I have power over my students,” Olga said. “They don't have the power to run the class—that's my policy. When I teach I have to do my best so I will be considered as good as my male colleagues.”

 

Olga is a confident person. She is convinced that, among other things, her curriculum will make a difference and change men's attitudes towards women. And talking to her, you can't help but believe Olga is right. Unlike many Timorese of either sex, she is not a shy person and her focused eyes and her firm voice make anything seem possible—even a wholesale change of the Timorese culture.

Already over the course of the last year she helped train some 35 civil servants. Olga believes they learned a thing or two – “I think the training was a success, participants not only showed up but were active during the training which shows that they really wanted to learn about CEDAW and gender equality.”

Olga said women in the Timorese civil service have had to face everything from overt sexual harassment to the more subtle problem of different work expectations. “Sometimes the directors discriminate against female civil servants because they don't see men and women the same,” Olga said. “For example, some bosses don't allow women to go into the districts although they think it's fine for men to go.”

Based on the pilot run in 2007, Olga said she and her team have spent 2008 tweaking the program and improving the lessons. She said she hopes to have a working model ready to roll out across the country in 2009.

She know however that her work is far from over. Even in the districts where she's already tested the trainings, more work will have to be done to convince people of CEDAW's principles. “I want to say that the civil servants in the government will need more information and training on women's issues,” Olga said. “You can't just give a one day or one week training and expect people to change. You need to keep offering more trainings until people really understand the message.”

 

This could seem overwhelming, but Olga doesn't let the enormity of her task get to her. These days she focuses on getting the CEDAW message out. “Right now our goal is to transfer the knowledge and skills,” Olga said. “But whether or not the civil servants accept the message is up to them. I can't say yet whether the civil servants will accept the message.”

Though Olga has a tough road ahead of her, she said she gets a lot of support from the rest of the CEDAW trainers. Despite the fact that she is one of only two women on a team of eight, she said she feels she is treated as an equal. “I think the men treat us women the same because in class we share materials and learning tools,” she said. “Whoever is weaker, we all help that person and we strengthen one another.” If only the rest of Timor were so easily convinced. “It's very difficult to change the culture here,” Olga said. “But the responsibility of a trainer is to simply show them alternatives. It's difficult to really change their minds in such a short amount of time; a lot of that depends on whether or not they really want to change.”

 

If anyone can do it, Olga can. Olga has been training in various positions for the better part of a decade. She said she did not take the INAP job to relax. “I wanted to become a trainer at INAP because my situation demanded it,” Olga said. “I wanted something difficult.”

 

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