FEBRUARY 6-8, 2006

Staff chart strategies for 2006

As a strategic organization, it is imperative to review the new landscape for our work that has emerged during the past year, and identify the strategic objectives for the coming year. In India, we now have a solid 5-year track record of empowering women's leadership in local democracy. At the same time, the political environment continues to shift and we continue to evolve new ways to take this strategy broader and deeper. For three days, the staff from across India came together and grappled with these issues with John Coonrod and Supriya Banavalikar from the Global Office

John Coonrod, Vice President	Rita Sarin, Country Director
Supriya Banavalikar, South Asia Program Associate, and Virendra Srimali from Rajasthan	Bineeta, from Bihar.

A perfect example of changing strategies is in Bihar. Unlike other states, Bihar did not enact a reservation for women as panchayat presidents. As a result, less than 1% of panchayats are headed by women in Bihar. The Hunger Project mobilized thousands of women panchayat representatives to march on the capital, and has advanced litigation in the courts to turn this situation.

Suddenly, the new Chief Minister of Bihar has announced that - not only will the upcoming panchayat elections have a reservation for women presidents, but the reservation will be 50%! If this commitment makes it into law, it will be extraordinary. So now we are designing strategies in support of that.

Soumya, who recently completed a survey of women panchayat presidents in Bihar.	A break with a Hindi song that entails much flapping of wings.
Arif, our coordinator in Assam.	Arvind Khejriwal addresses the new Right to Information law.

In addition to the new reservation law in Bihar, there were several important themes that emerged that will shape the strategies in 2006:

• A new national Right to Information Law provides an enormous tool for panchayats to learn what resources should be available at the local level and to reduce corruption.
• Many of our key states are having panchayat elections this year - during such times, we focus our resources on pre-election voter awareness campaigns instead of Women's Leadership Workshops for leaders who are about to leave office.
• The initial lessons from our Aagaz Academy - Women's Leadership Centers - is that women are very willing to attend intensive training, and that such training pays off. Yet the Aagaz process is very expensive and only available to a few. What is the best strategy for providing additional training to elected women representatives? We now have diverse experience, which we need to distill into a shared, optimized methodology.