Culture continues to be a major barrier for women's economic empowerment. AWCF executive director Sally Ganibe said that in many countries, women are still not allowed to own property and in places where women may own land, they barely have access to capital and credit. “Gender biases remain. If it does not generate money, then a programme for women becomes second priority,” she asserted, adding that, “it is for this reason that AWCF invests so much in social marketing.”
One example of this is AWCF's international conference on women's empowerment in micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) in the ASEAN region from February 11 to 12, 2008 in the Philippines. The event showcased best practices of gender mainstreaming among cooperatives and facilitated dialogues between and among women's cooperatives, regional bodies, and social movements.
The first day introduced the partnership of AWCF and ASEAN Foundation (AF) on women's economic empowerment. This partnership, which spanned seven years consists of a regional forum; an exchange programme; and a capacity-building programme which includes this conference and an ICT training.
The Credit Union of Thailand, Ltd. (CULT), a member of AWCF, also shared their experience in applying their learnings as they established business development centres in different parts of the country. CULT have managed to set up at least four ICT training centres, which have so far trained 906 participants among their members, with 65 percent of them women. The participants later helped create a co-operative virtual network which further facilitated the cooperatives' access to the internet as a platform for marketing their products. As Kruewan Chonlanai says, “If you know how to use the internet, you can get all the information you need for your products.” With a huge network, functional system, and knowledgeable staff in place, CULT's current tasks are to translate much of its online content in English and plan other marketing strategies.
Aside from the joint projects of AWCF and AF, CULT was also a participant in it@coop, a three country-capacity-building programme supported by the German foundation, InWent.
The conference also provided an interface between AWCF cooperative members, on the one hand and regional bodies such as the ASEAN Confederation of Women's Organisation (ACWO), and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as well as the free and open source movement. ACWO president Dr. Amelou Reyes shared ACWO's framework of “Womenomics” which veers away from the past poverty strategies which “consider women as victims.”Womenomics consists of three components: (1) women entrepreneurship and microfinance; (2) women's integration in the digital economy; and (3) e-leadership/ e-governance. “Women can be producers and organisers provided that they have the appropriate skills and policy environment,” Reyes asserted. ACWO has been advocating a ministerial for women within ASEAN.
LK Santos-Cacho of ILO's Sub-regional Office for South East Asia and the Pacific highlighted ILO's Recommendation 189 which provides guidelines for national policies and actions on small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Meanwhile, Dr. Alvin Marcelo of the International Open Source Network-ASEAN +3 provided an orientation on free and open source software (FOSS) and its potential as an “equalising factor.”
Through its engagement in international governance processes such as the UNIFEM, UNDP, and UNESCAP, AWCF has advocated an increase membership of women in cooperatives; greater seat allocation for women in the leadership including the board; and gender-disaggregated data collection, among others.
For the next six years, AWCF aims to participate in legislative process on the national level and expand their membership in Laos PDR, Cambodia and Burma.
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