What have we achieved?

• Created conceptual clarity pertaining to women's rights, equality and non-discrimination; and inspiring women's groups in the region to coordinate their advocacy within a rights-based framework;

• Improved capacity of women's groups in Asia. The interrelatedness of our projects has enabled participating groups at the national level to build on their experiences and expand the scope of their work effectively; from attending trainings to becoming trainers themselves; from advocacy at the national level to providing input and influencing international processes;

• Built capacity by developing methodologies and instruments for analysing the various sites of discrimination, to achieve de facto equality of women, and for training women's rights advocates. These include a monitoring tool, a methodology for the application of CEDAW in differing contexts, and a five-module training package, and have been used to build capacity of various categories of people from NGOs to governments to lawyers;

• Established CEDAW monitoring networks in 12 countries and built their capacity to identify discrimination and engage in advocacy, both at the national and international levels. This has enabled them to bring about policy, law and institutional reform (e.g. in countries such as Malaysia, Pakistan, India and Nepal);

• Facilitated activism regionally and globally that has helped link national with international advocacy;

• Geographical expansion of the programme. In this region alone, IWRAW Asia Pacific has had a significant presence in 12 countries. They are:

  - South Asia: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
  - South East Asia: Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam
  - East Asia: Mongolia

  Additionally, we have also worked in Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Maldives, and Tajikistan.
  

  Originally starting in Asia, our programme has grown over the last ten years for us to have an international presence as well today. Among other ways, this has happened through our "From Global to Local" Project which links local-level advocacy with international official processes for monitoring the implementation of the CEDAW Convention; the global campaign "Our Rights Are Not Optional" for the ratification and use of the Optional Protocol to the CEDAW Convention; and our involvement in contributing to the formulation of General Recommendations in both CEDAW and ICESCR; and

• Transferred the knowledge gained on the application of the principles of equality and non-discrimination through working with the CEDAW Convention to other treaty processes. This has been done:
  
  
  • By encouraging women's groups to present alternate reports to other treaty bodies;
  • By contributing to the formulation of the General Recommendation on Equality by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights with regard to article 3 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR); and
  • Through our involvement in promoting the drafting of an Optional Protocol to the ICESCR. (These are on-going processes.)

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