Working Globally...Locally

Where's Kelly?
I experienced an earthquake and now a hurricane, have teleconferenced with colleagues in Geneva, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Bahamas, arranged a conference in Thailand, and gone into work early to make calls to Turkey. Where was I? In New York, of course! It's been quite an exciting summer working with the United Nations Development Programme ("UNDP") in the Gender Cluster of the HIV/AIDS Group of the Bureau for Development Policy ("BDP"). I had the privilege of touching livesglobally from the UN headquarters in New York this summer.

Part of the UNDP BDP HIV/AIDS Group, Evacuated for the August 23rd earthquake. (I am third from the right)

Reflecting on last year's work:

Last May 2010, I worked in as a Leitner intern in New Zealand in refugee family reunification, with the Wellington Community Law Centre. This was a direct client services position working through the legal process of New Zealand to refugees who had been resettled to New Zealand from parts of East Africa and South America.

This summer's experience was much different, not only because I was locally situated in New York, but also because I had the opportunity to work with an inter-governmental organization ("IGO") as opposed to an non-governmental organization ("NGO"). My involvement this summer was also more focused on policy than on direct client services. Each experience developed a different set of legal skills, and has allowed me to see the benefits of each working environment.

The facts on HIV & gender:

Much of my work has focused on the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women ("CEDAW"). (Get used to the acronyms--this is the UN). CEDAW is the primary international human rights treaty establishing the framework around which discrimination against women can be addressed. Through its focus on gender equality, CEDAW is a particularly helpful tool for enforcing the rights of HIV-positive women and girls. Article 12 of the Convention specifically addresses equality of the right to health, which in the context of HIV translates to equality in access to not just treatment but also to preventative care. Worldwide, about 50% of all people living with HIV are women. In the Caribbean 53% of HIV-positive individuals are women, and in sub-Saharan Africa it is closer to 60%. In Asia, while in 1990 only 21% of those living with the virus were women, this jumped to 35% in 2009. In short, women and girls bear an increasingly significant burden of the epidemic, and this extends beyond just these numbers.

Gender inequality is both a cause and a consequence of HIV. Women and girls' lack of sexual and reproductive health rights contributes to HIV vulnerability. In example, social norms suggesting sexual health education is inappropriate for women and girls, legal barriers requiring women to be accompanied by their husband to visit a sexual health center, and economic challenges preventing women from accessing the financial resources needed to travel to a clinic or pay for services all contribute to increased vulnerability of women and girls to HIV. An estimated 18% of material mortality globally is attributable to HIV. The effects of HIV also fall disproportionately on women and girls: taking on roles as caretakers for HIV-positive family members, experiencing heightened stigma within communities, becoming more likely targets for violence, and being coerced or into sterilization by medical professionals.

The work, an example:

With these realities in mind, one of my primary projects has focused on working with specific countries to augment their monitoring and reporting for CEDAW. Governments and civil society organizations like NGOs both contribute separate reports to the CEDAW Committee every four years. We are working to directly target three Caribbean countries who will be reporting in July 2012. To do this, we analyzed past reports for where HIV was addressed and looked for entry points where HIV could have been discussed and should be monitored in the future. Based on these conclusions, we will hold workshops in each of the countries meeting with NGOs working with HIV-positive women and provided technical support to develop strategies for monitoring discrimination and then for drafting the reports. For the government actors responsible for the report submissions, we will work with them separately in workshops in the same way.

Another aspect of the work has been targeting the CEDAW Committee, a panel of 23 experts on women's rights. Last month, we held a briefing with a plurality of the Committee members to brief them on the HIV dimensions of discrimination against women and develop a framework for moving forward with the Committee on incorporating HIV into the CEDAW report review process. This involvement will heighten in advance of the January 2012 and July 2012 CEDAW sessions as well.

The future:

This summer's work has been inspiring, and I will continue to work part-time throughout the 2011 fall semester.

For more information on HIV/AIDS and for support of the statistics referenced in this entry, see UNAIDS. Global Report on HIV. 2010, available at http://www.unaids.org/documents/20101123_GlobalReport_em.pdf

A Summer at the UNDP

Since I wrote the final post last summer, I suppose it's appropriate to kick off this summer with the first one. This year, I'm in New York, working with another intergovernmental organization, the United Nations. As with everything at the UN, there are a lot of acronyms to describe exactly where I'm working: I'm at the UNDP (UN Development Programme), in the BDP (Bureau of Development Policy), in the PG (Poverty Group), and working primarily on Legal Empowerment issues (sometimes shortened to LE).

It's a very exciting time for Legal Empowerment at the UNDP--the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor just launched its final report today. The Commission was independent, but hosted by the UNDP--it was co-chaired by Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the economist Hernando de Soto. At the core of the report are four pillars: Property Rights, Labor Rights, Business Rights, and Access to Justice and Rule of Law. The main idea behind Legal Empowerment is that given the right opportunities--whether by formalizing land ownership, providing accessible dispute resolution, or ensuring effective legal systems--the marginalized and vulnerable groups of the world (an estimated 4 billion people that are excluded from the rule of law) can pull themselves out of poverty. Basically, Legal Empowerment says the world's poor don't need aid, they need opportunity in the form of legal, political, and ownership systems that work for them and put them on equal footing with the elite. After years of meetings and many revisions, the report is out, and the Commission has made its recommendations. Now is a crucial time as policy makers and country offices at UNDP determine how to proceed, utilizing Legal Empowerment's concepts and methodologies to promote development in line with the UNDP's Strategic Plan.

I feel that I am very much on the cutting edge of this new terrain in development--so far I've been in contact with country offices across Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, helping to coordinate their country-level efforts with the BDP, UNDP's policy center. One of my biggest tasks so far has been to develop a database of Legal Empowerment projects going on around the world, both in progress and in the pipeline. This serves dual purposes: it helps to raise partner and donor awareness, which can lead to direct project support, and it also provides a model for other country offices who are looking for programming best-practices in specific areas.

I attended the launch this afternoon, and it was an amazing event. Dignitaries and press were there from all over the world. I got to hear Madeleine Albright and Hernando de Soto speak about legal empowerment, along with Naresh Singh, the Executive Director of the Commission, Kemal Dervis of the UNDP, and Mike Bishop, a writer for The Economist, acting as moderator for the expert panel. I got to meet and speak briefly with both Dr. de Soto and Secretary Albright(here's a picture of me with her: I'm the one with the goofy smile). I was very happy for the opportunity to see and hear great minds elaborate on Legal Empowerment of the Poor around the world, and was more than impressed with what they had to say.

So far it's been a great summer, and I'm less than a month in.