Showing posts with label Overseas Work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Overseas Work. Show all posts
I owe everyone one more story for the Global Solidarity Challenge. Unfortunately I got rained out on the friday (as did the entire city) and last week turned more than a little hectic with last minute work. In addition to being my last GSC story, this will also be my last story about market women in Tanzania as I fly out to my city and job in London tomorrow.


I would like to introduce Consolatha Cleophas, a tailor in Ilala market who is one of the most energetic paralegals in our programme. All by herself she started using what she learned in the paralegal training to conduct legal awareness sessions in the market. I interviewed her on Tuesday and I would like to share her story.

Why Did You Apply to Become a Paralegal?
When I saw the advertisements for paralegal I didn't know what a paralegal was. Then EfG came to the market and explained which made me curious. Even thought I didn't know a lot about it, I thought it was an opportunity to learn. Now I really like what I am doing and I am happy to be able to help my community know the laws and help people settle disputes.

Why did you start also teaching even men in the markets about legal issues?
I have been teaching both women and men traders in the market. At first I only taught women, but then the men wanted to know as well so I started to teach them. Mainly we talk about marriage and inheritance laws. I discovered that men also don't know the laws. If I only teach women it can create conflict. Men are happy about the teaching and are even asking for publications. I'm happy to share publications with the men because they go home and teach everyone in their household, including women and girls about the law.

What are People Most Surprised to Learn About in the Laws?
Most people are surprised to learn that any property bought during a marriage is joint property. Both women and men usually think that only men can own property but even a housewife is entitled to property bought by the husband during the marriage.

People are also surprised to learn that if a woman and a man live together for two years in a community they are recognized to be married. If they divorce, the women has the same rights to support and property as in a registered marriage.

Why is it important for women to know their rights and the laws?
It is important because laws affect the daily lives of women and they need to be able to defend their rights. Right now married women buy land secretly and keep the title with a friend because they are afraid of their husbands. A lot of women suffer abuse but “only god knows” because they don't understand their rights and where to go for help.

How has being a paralegal changed how you feel about yourself?
Being a paralegal has really changed my status in the market. I have discovered that I love to teach people. Now as I go through the market both men and women call me “Mama Law.” I am respected and people seek me out for advice.

What has been the most exciting thing so far about being a paralegal?

I travelled to Dodoma and I got to meet with an established paralegal unit there. They started just like we are starting but now those first paralegals even train other paralegals. There are some paralegals who have gone back to school and now hold law degrees. When I see that, I think even one day I could become a lawyer.

Working with Equality for Growth has been an amazing experience and the nine months I have spent here were incredible. Thanks so much to everyone whose followed along and read my blog. I plan to continue to right though in a slightly different vein in London so please stay tuned for updates!
Day 4 of Global Solidarity Challenge and I wanted to visit with some of the women who do tailoring in the market. Not all markets have tailoring section so I haven't met very many of them over the past few months and this seemed a great opportunity to see another side of market trading.


I've visited tailors before in Zambia to get clothes made from kitenge (local fabric). However, what I found here in the market was nothing like the small tailoring booths I'd seen before. It was more like being on a factory floor than visiting a tailor. Whole sections with women and men crammed together back behind the clothing shops of the market, working away on pedal sewing machines.

I met with Rukia, she has been working in the market for seven years, ever since her daughter was born and she needed to get income for the both of them. She learned to sew from a class she took in her home town before moving to Dar es Salaam.


Rukia doesn't actual sew for individuals coming in off the street. She's another piece of the used-clothing industry. After used-clothing vendors have bought clothes from people like Betty, they do one of two things with them. If the clothes are good quality the go straight to resell them. But some clothes are bought with an eye to make alterations. This can be as simple as making pants into shorts or they can be made into completely different items. Rukia spends her time making skirts, typically out of oversized dress shirts that are considered too big to sell.

It turns out, a lot of the clothes being sold in Tanzania is "recycled fashion." Now, some of my favourite items of clothing come from a Toronto based store recycled clothing store called Pre-Love where a lot items sell for over $100. However, here recycled fashion isn't a eco-trend. Its part of a waste-not want-not philosophy. Just because an item is too big or a bit ripped doesn't mean it should go to waste!

Being more common its also not nearly as highly priced. Rukia is paid 400 Tshs or about $0.18 for each skirt she makes. On an average day she'll make about 35 skirts, which makes her take home roughly $10.  This is about twice what a vegetable seller would bring home buts it a lot of work to run a pedal machine all day.


I talked to Rukia about how recycled fashion is more of a luxury where I come from. She says that unfortunately they don't get to set their own prices. The clothing vendors are the ones who determine the cost of all alterations and if you don't accept that price they'll just find someone else. This is why Equality for Growth wants to investigate starting a social enterprise among the women tailors. If women came together, they would be able to bid as a group to produce and get better prices overall. And women like Rukia would be able to make a better living, working in a better environment.

Please help support the great work of VIDEA and its partners like Equality to Growth by supporting me through my solidarity challenge!
Day three of the Global Solidarity Challenge and I headed out to see a very different side of market trading. There are hierarchies in market trading. How high up you are depends on two things; the volume of goods you move and what type of goods you have. Therefore it is the wholesalers, those who sell good to other market traders, who always make the most profit. And the most profitable goods being sold in the markets are used clothes.

Have you every wondered what happens to all those used clothes at Goodwill or Value Village? There are far more used clothes than people buying them in Canada. Well whatever isn't sold in Canada, is sold to exporters who ship it off to Africa where alongside clothes from USA, China and Korea its has become a major trade. By the way I've been informed that clothes from Canada are the highest quality and go for the highest price (and the women tried to get me to start exporting to them).


There is a fair bit of criticism of this practice- mainly that it has destroyed most local clothing production in Africa which would provide a lot more jobs than the used clothes industry. But for the people who make their living in the industry its a vital part of business. Importers buy the clothing bales at the port and then sell them to clothing wholesalers in the market. Women like, Betty (the one with glasses) buys 8-10 bags of clothes a week. Bag cost vary by item and quality but a typically a bag the size of a hay-bale goes for 200-300 dollars.

Every day Betty will open up one or two bags and auction off items to the crowds of men and women who buy them to resell the items to customers. Each item can go for $5-$10 dollars. People come from all over Tanzania to buy clothes from Ilala market where Betty works. She says its a lot easier to be a wholesaler than to sell direct to customers because she is never without clients.

Unsurprisingly, the hardest thing about being a clothing wholesaler is to put together the capital to be able to buy the bales. Its taken Betty years to build up the capital to do business on the level she does. She started as a wholesaler in 1999, after coming to Dar Es Salaam from district up near the Ugandan border. She's taken a lot of risk with loans to get the capital to buy her goods and sometimes she's lost her stock because of it but she's managed to make it work. Through her business, Betty doesn't just support herself and daughter but also supports both her elderly parents and helps out brothers and sisters.

The market has given Betty a very good income. But she says the crowded conditions in clothing markets, lack of ventilation and heavy dust from the fabric are a major problem. The biggest concern for her is that Tuberculosis is rampant among traders. While improving her own business is important, she wants to be able to come to work without worrying that she's going to come down ill. Thats why Betty became the chair of the women's association to help campaign for a better market. Because she believes just because the market gives great opportunity for business, she and her fellow traders shouldn't have to put up with bad conditions.

 Please help support the great work of VIDEA and its partners like Equality to Growth by supporting me through my solidarity challenge!
Today for the Global Solidarity Challenge I headed out of the downtown and away from the high rises to Gongo La Mboto market. Far from being well off, its one of the cheapest communities to live in that still has relatively direct access to the city core so lots of people live out that way.


At the market I met with Sihaba, a 34 year old trader who runs a business selling drinks and plantains. Sihaba started trading four years ago. She is a single mother with two children- a girl of thirteen and a boy of seven. Her decision to trade was simple, she needed money but had no real skills. Trading was the obvious choice so she started to look for a good location. It was her brother that told her to look in Gongo La Mboto market. She started off by selling plastic bags to traders and customers in the market, but since bags sell for less than $0.01 she wasn't getting ahead. She switched to selling plantains and eventually got enough funds together to start selling cold drinks.

Because she mentioned her brother, I asked Sihaba if her family had helped her set up her business. Her response was that they didn't offer and she didn't ask. Its not uncommon for women to struggle with finding support for starting business even within their own families. Women aren't seen as a "worthwhile" business investment. So its not surprising that Sihaba has had to make it own her own.

Sihaba actually has a great location in the market. Its a proper stall but its mainly empty. She wishes that it could be more like what we might call a "corner store." Her dream is for it to be stocked with everything from food goods to drinks and cleaning supplies. However, to get the capital to invest in all those goods is way beyond her means. However, next week she and all the other women traders will get back their years worth of savings from their saving and credit group so there is hope for growth in the future.


Unlike Rose, from yesterday, Sihaba is more focused on making ends meet. But then she doesn't have the support of a husband to help share the financial burden and let her invest in her business. Right now the fact that she doesn't need to relying on anyone else and is able to send her two kids to school is a lot. Being able to stand on your own two feet is no small thing. She is someone who does what needs to be done and finds a way to make it work. Market trading has given her the financial means to be independent and make her own decisions. That is a lot of be proud of.

Please help support the great work of VIDEA and its partners like Equality to Growth by supporting me through my solidarity challenge!
We had a pretty banger week at EfG. Our Executive Director won the Martin Luther King Jr Drum Major Award from the American Embassy and then we had our women's day celebration. Its important to stop sometimes and celebrate what has been accomplished and these occasions gave everyone an opportunity to do exactly that.

The celebration for the award included a ceremony at the American Embassy (the lack of pictures from the ceremony can be blamed on the security at the Embassy). Our director took this moment to highlight informal sector women and also call upon all sectors of society to seek out avenues to making small trading a step out of poverty.

Our celebration for International Women's day had a bit more locally flavoured. We held the event at Tabata Muslim Market. Key to celebration (and really any celebration we've done) is the inclusion of traditional performance groups. These groups are dance, acrobatics and theatre all rolled into one.

The acrobatics are something I don't remember from my other travels in South Africa, but I've seen them at our events and other events throughout Tanzania. They include contortion and balance acts

leaps and flips...

Some pretty interesting dual dance moves. This woman was dancing with one of the male performers twisted around her waist.

And of course, if there is dancing everyone else needs to join in.

We took the opportunity to explain the award to our traders, and how the Executive Director accepted it in recognition of women's traders. Our women were pretty thrilled to the extent that they actually picked her up and carried her through the crowd (sort of like a coach after a winning game!)


This week also marked the completion of our strategic plan. Hopefully all this energy can carry everyone forward to get it up and going.
Where you trade in the market has a big impact on how successful your business is. This is even more important in the really big markets. Two weeks ago, several of the women vegetable traders in Ilala market were shifted from their spots to a new location on the outskirts of the market. They had been petitioning the market committee to place all vegetable sellers closer to the other food vendors so that customers would have easier access.

This move was not what they had in mind.
The new location of the sellers was muddy with pools of standing water (even though it hasn't rained in days). Stalls are located along the edge of drainage ditches that haven't been cleaned in ages. We watched as one woman lost some of her pumpkins when they rolled down into the dirty ditches.


Some women have tried to move to one of the side-streets, but they're paying double taxes as the street committee and the market committee disagree about whose territory this is.

So what happened? Reports from the women say that they were moved by the market committee after a group of tomato vendors from another market bribed the committee and officials to take their place.

This sort of corruption does not make the news, but it does have a major impact on women's lives. This is why working with market women isn't just about economic empowerment and business skills. That is not enough. Business plans and good accounting are great, but if your business can be uprooted at any time you can't get ahead. Knowing your rights, knowing where to go and how to demand accountability from the very people you elected to be in charge, is just as important.

And these women are fighting back. They've mobilized and begun an organized response working from the market committee up to the municipal government. Its probably going to be a battle - no one wants to claim responsibility or even knowledge of what happened. But then, knowing your rights doesn't mean you automatically win. Its about having good tools and the confidence to be able to fight. And the 20 women who are showing up in the councillors' offices know the system, they know their rights and are there to get answers. I say more power to them.
My first few weeks back to the office have been filled with report submissions (the groan from all development workers is audible at this statement). So I was initially at a loss as to what sort of story I could write this week about work with women traders.

Then I realized that this gives me a chance to update you on all my previous stories. In development you often hear about initial activities and impact but any subsequent progress (or lack thereof) gets lost. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to let you know how things are going...

The market has had up and down success with keeping their environment clean. Women have had to repeatedly talk to the municipality about garbage collection, but the market traders themselves decided to take direct action and have declared Saturdays to be “Market Cleaning Day”.

Kigogo Fresh is still under construction but some women have started trading. Other markets are getting on the band-wagon for improving market infrastructure - Mchikichini Market is currently negotiating with the Municipality to rebuild the market and include new stalls for women traders.


Tabata Muslim women traders are looking to revise their Market Constitution. A committee is collecting input for the new constitution. Issues on the table include: gender-based violence, women's representation in leadership and women's ownership of stalls.

Ferry Market has agreed to have 5 special seats for women on the market committee. Elections have happened in each zone but they are still waiting to hold the general market committee elections.

Women's saving and loan groups are still going strong. Most women's major concern is that now that they have the capital to expand into more profitable businesses, they need practical skills to be able to create high-value products like soap or batik.

A few women formed a committee to lead women traders' engagement in Constitutional Reform. So far, they've held a press conference and one planning meeting. A major focus will be ensuring that market women are registered to vote in the referendum and are included in the special parliament to be held on Constitutional Reform.

Led by Gezaulole, several markets are looking to revise rules so that customers will pay for their food before being served. It's a small step, but it puts female food vendors in a much better place for receiving payment rather than harassment.





We are working to help the paralegals get involved with staff in legal awareness sessions to share more general legal knowledge with women traders as well as handle individual cases.
I have been struggling about how to write the post for the end of my stay in Dar es Salaam. But it looks like I've managed to escape this task because I'M COMING BACK IN JANUARY!
Last minute, I've managed to pull together more work for another 3 months, so I will be swinging through London and Canada before heading back to Tanzania in January.

The next few months going to be a bit different because I will be coming back on my own but I'm really excited to be able to continue to working with Equality for Growth. Its going to be an busy three months as we work to get the new strategic plan under way.

So I now have a weekend of “see you later,” instead of “good-bye” though I will still be saying tearful good-byes (and this is a literal prediction) to my fellow interns. Next posting will be from the Northern Hemisphere!
There is a quote on the bulletin board in our office which says “In the absence of good structures, even good people behave badly.” This quote rings very true in a lot of the work that we do, but there is another piece to this equation that has also become very clear to me- Good structures are only helpful when people are aware of them and know how to navigate them.
This is exactly the challenge women market trader's face in their lives. Bureaucracy is confusing to most of us, but with low levels of education, no access to information and no one to guide you through the process, its a nightmare. Imagine if you had no idea how to get a piece of ID, why you needed a marriage certificate or what a contract was, and nobody else around you had any clue either. This lack of legal knowledge leaves women vulnerable to everything from fake marriages and abuse to property grabbing and business scams.

Which is why Equality for Growth is launching a legal aid program for market women. The project official launched this fall at a big opening ceremony. Over the next year, 25 women and men who work in and around the markets will attend training sessions to become paralegals. These paralegals will be able to help women with basic legal advice, mediate disputes and guide them through the legal system.
What is incredible is that these women and men are all volunteers. There is no funding to pay paralegals for their work and they offer their services for free. Most of them will be juggling their own business at the same time. For most people who work a full-time job, volunteering one afternoon a week can be a struggle. These people will likely see 3-5 clients a week. Its an impressive commitment.

At the first training session, the paralegals to-be biggest worry was that they wouldn't be able to understand enough of law and legal practice to offer advice. This has rapidly changed. The second training session ended just last week and the groups was confident enough to tell the trainers they wanted the last few hours of the training so they could plan as a group to set up their work in the markets. In the course of a couple months they've gone from hesitant to full-throttle.

Its a neat aspect of the project, that as much as the women will benefit from the legal aid, those trained also really benefit from the sense of confidence and community they get from being part of the paralegal team. I think it will be exciting to see, not just the help the new paralegals will provide but also how this experience will also ripple through their own lives and what else it might empower them to do.
One of the biggest challenges I always have in working in Africa is the fact that, as a women, you are constantly treated as a sexual object. Declarations of “you're beautiful, I love you, come here!” from random strangers are more disturbing than complimentary. Male friendships are almost impossible and more often than not end up in unwelcome advances.

These situations have a way of getting to me because I know its symptomatic of a much larger and deeply disturbing issue. According to national statistics, 44% of women in Tanzania experience sexual and/or physical violence and 30% of girls experience sexual violence before their 18th birthday. In addition, over 60% of girls think its okay for a husband to beat his wife if she does something such as argue with him, leave the house without telling him, burn food or doesn't properly take care of the household. I have been told flat out that here men don't sexually harassment women, they are just paying a compliment and admiring women.

Its a compliment though that most women would happily pass on. Which is why, EfG launched a small pilot campaign last winter on verbal abuse in the markets. “Mpe Riziki Si Matusi” or “Give Payment not Abuse” was an assertion of women's right to be treated as business owners and not sexual objects. Around 80% of women traders experience verbal and physical sexual harassment on a daily basis, especially from other male traders. It's not uncommon for men to use sexual harassment as a way to discourage women from asking for payment for their goods. Touching, grabbing, constant remarks serve to stop women from asserting themselves. And if the women object? Well this generally leads to greater harassment since you clearly don't know your place.

This campaign focused on working with both men and women market leaders and traders to create an environment where sexual harassment wasn't tolerated. Though the campaign was small, women involved said it continues to provided them with the strength to protest such behaviour and fellow male traders have even stepped up to stop harassment when they see it happen.

Drops of water in a very big bucket. Sometimes working in women's rights there are days you don't know whether to cry or scream in frustration. But this work is not for those who need to see instant results, changes or feel like you as an individual made the difference. Its for those who will celebrate small victories knowing they are part of a long-term, multi-generational battle. In the end you have to simply believe that its a fight worth fighting and these women clearly do.
Tanzania is in the process of reforming its Constitution. I have to confess I was completely unaware that this was going on prior to coming here. However, its proven to be an important issue and I've found myself on a steep learning curve to bring myself up to speed.

Constitution reform is an important time for the women's movement. The priorities are two-fold; first to ensure that women are full and active participants in the process of constitutional reform and second that through that participation women's rights and issues are included in the Constitution. This is an opportunity to get women's rights enshrined in the highest law of the land and no one wants to let that pass by.
Equality for Growth is part of a coalition of women's organizations who applied to submit recommendations as a special interest group for women. But the goal is not to submit our own thoughts on the Constitution. We want to collect the thoughts and input of the informal women traders we work with. Which is why this week, we held a two-day dialogue session on constitutional reform with women from our market associations and other groups including women with disabilities and women living with HIV/AIDS.

Now, I thought that a workshop on Constitution reform might be a bit of a hard sell. After all, I can't imagine a group of Canadian women taking two days off from their work to debate women's rights in the Constitution. I think its hard for most people to see the impact of the Constitution on their daily lives. And on top of that, we are asking women to leave their businesses and livelihoods for two days to participate in these discussions.

Well, these women's passion and interest would put us all to shame. These women aren't just present. They are engaged, eager to participate and demanding to be heard. Even the facilitator, who has run countless workshops on Constitution reform during the past year is astounded by these women's energy. Over the past two days I have seen women stand up and passionately defend the importance of their participation in constitutional reform and the inclusion of women's rights. One woman stood up and called for all women in Tanzania to refuse to bear children for a year as a protest against the lack of reproductive health rights. She brought the entire group to their feet cheering.


Being at workshops like this one, full of local women cheering and singing about women's rights makes me wonder what would happen if our constitution was up for reform. Would we be as passionate about the process? Would we be up there arguing that women should have 50% participation and that rights to health and childcare should be enshrined at constitutional level? I'm not certain we would. In fact, I very much suspect we would all be in desperate need of an infusion of Tanzanian spirit.
We are officially at the half way mark of our internships today. Its incredible especially when I feel like I've just gotten settled. I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but just recently I noticed that life here seemed normal and I'm feeling pretty happy and grounded. Looking back, the past three months have been a mix of letting go of habits from home and adapting to the new environment. Here are some of the hurdles I feel like I've gotten over:

Giving up on My Hair (And Other Things Related to My Appearance)
We all want to look our best, especially when making first impressions. This is a bit challenging when your iron seems to be hot enough to burn fabric but useless at getting wrinkles out. Or when your hairdryer shorts-out in the first month despite being plugged into an adaptor. Its also hard to let go of your own personal style in favour of wearing culturally appropriate clothes. But coming to work wearing my hair in a French braid and following the style advice from co-workers (knee length but fitted skirts get a big thumbs up) always results in the biggest compliment of all; “You look so African today!”
Getting Around
There are few things that make me feel more stressed than not knowing where I'm going. On top of that stress, buses here constantly change their routes, most taxi drivers seem only vaguely familiar with the city, and I swear there is a really good video game idea about walking down Dar streets and dodging traffic in all its various forms. Eventually you just have to let go of the panic and go with it. You try to guess what the different money-making strategies are for the buses, work out the point system for the video game and know that the taxi can always ask people for directions once they are in the right neighbourhood.

Social Diversity
When I first got here, all four of us interns stuck together all the time. We only knew the few people we worked with and each other. This led to a lot of together time, which was a little intense for four people who didn't know each other before training. Now we've made friends with our co-workers, neighbours and a rather large group of Canadian ex-pats that would make you wonder if Canada is exporting its youth to Tanzania. Instead of having too much down time, we've switched over to trying to balance our social schedules among all the different demands. This has gone a long way to break-up the group a bit and give everyone a breather from each other (probably a saving grace for our friendships).


I confess I'm a bit surprised to find myself sad to be at this point. After counting down the days during the first few months, all of a sudden I want every week to stretch out and give me more time. I'm beginning to think I might just have found another place in the world where I feel at home.
Today I want today to share some of the individual success stories from our market women. But as I go through them I find myself in a bit of a dilemma; the stories I really want to share are the ones where market women have overcome what seem like impossible challenges. They are all great stories, but I feel like I'm airing someone's personal pain all over the Internet without them really knowing.

So instead, I'm going to tackle this a bit more generally.

The women we work with are supporting their children and families which means meeting all their basic needs. This means food, housing, water, education and health. Sometimes they are the ones responsible for doing this simply because of low levels of overall household income but often there are other complications.

It seems like at least half the women I talk to have had spouses who walked out on them. A lot of women suffered from abuse or were abandoned for getting pregnant (or in other cases for not getting pregnant). For some of them circumstances were so bad that they had to flee their community and that is why they are here in Dar es Salaam. On top of losing the support of an income earner, these women lost the property they had invested in, were chased from their homes and in some cases had their businesses and livelihoods destroyed by angry or abusive husbands.

And so they started over. They scrapped together capital with savings and loans from friends to start a small business. However they often get stuck because with low capital they can't start a strong and profitable business. In addition, most of these women were never prepared by education (formal or otherwise) to enter business.

EfG helps women save as a group and then loan money to each other to slowly build their business and capital. Women buy “shares” at a set amount every week and then are able to borrow up to 3 times as much as they contribute. So far, there are 23 groups with a total capital of $39,000 among them. Pretty amazing given that most women only bring in around $6 a day and are still supporting their families. Loans provide for everything from business improvements and diversification of activities to buying property and paying school fees.


All the funds are self-raised. As a group the women can share business success and advice among each other. They support each other when they are sick and unable to work. These women are literally able to lift each other up. And at the end of the day they are the cause of their own success. That sort of empowerment can't be given through a workshop, it only comes from being the one to change things for yourself.
All of the markets Equality for Growth (EfG) works in are male dominated but some of them are harder for women to work in than others. Ferry Market is one of them.

Ferry Market is one of the few local markets you'll find in a guidebook. It's the fish market for Dar es Salaam. On one side of the market fisherman dock their boats and sell their catch to wholesalers who then auction everything off. On the other side (pictured above), fish are cleaned and sold to customers. This picture was taken in the late afternoon, which is means this is a view of the market when it's quiet.

 Fish is good money here in Dar, and Ferry is where everyone buys from. Given that buying fish requires a large amount of capital to begin with and because fishing is a "male" activity, almost everything to do with fish at the market is also male dominated.

Now, that doesn't mean women don't work here. A lot of women are hired as labourers to clean and cut fish. They don't however own the business, which means they don't get a say in market affairs.

If you wander away from the fish selling area, you suddenly find yourself  in the only female dominated zone of Ferry. This is the food vendors area. Between all the men working in the market and the government offices located near by, these women's kitchens are very busy.

Other than the fact that their aren't many women here, you might ask what makes Ferry market so hard to work in. It isn't just the numbers. In fact, there are other markets with lower representation of women that aren't as bad or difficult to get involved in. At Ferry it's the attitudes about women working in a male-dominated industry. The market is aggressive with lots of fights breaking out all over the place. Men tend to throw their weight around and refuse to pay women for their work. Verbal abuse and harassment are every day issues, though most women are hesitant to report it.

So how do you address these issues? Well, helping the market leaders understand gender issues is a big part of EfG's strategy. It isn't an easy sell. The first time I went to visit the market I had an hour long conversation with the Market Secretary as he tried to explain to me why they couldn't have more than 2 women representatives on their council because women don't show up for meetings and don't contribute. This wasn't the first time EfG staff has heard these stories from the market leaders.

It is hard to help the men see what appears self-evident- women do double work with responsibilities at home, they are discouraged or even forbidden by family from socializing with men and their concerns may not be the same as male traders. While these talks can seem frustrating and repetitive, I think they are just as important as the work done to empower women. Men are half of the gender equation at the end of the day.

After several long debates and discussions, the market leaders agreed to help women stand for election on the market committees and the goal line was shifted to have 6 out of 18 representatives be women. Attitudes change slowly, but inch by inch its possible to gain ground. And I for one believe in celebrating every inched gained. If the election can go as planned it will triple women's representation. And all it took was being willing to engage in an ongoing dialogue around the issues and challenges. It can be the simplest things that make all the difference.