New Gender Perspectives for the Millennium: Challenges and Successful Models of North-South Collaboration

Abstract

Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish to thank the organizers of the African Studies Association's Women's Caucus for inviting me to share with you gender perspectives for the millennium as well as some of the challenges and successful models of North-South collaboration. As a development practitioner, my human rights activism, which spans several years and a number of continents, is now specifically located in an organization whose ideals I share. As Executive Director of MATCH International Centre, a 24-year-old women's development organization based in Canada, I am fortunate, while working in a field of personal interest, to work with several women's groups; groups whose membership and leadership cover the geographic regions of Anglophone and Francophone Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and South America. MATCH collaborates with women's groups who are committed to women's full and active participation in the development of their societies, who recognize the inequities that exists in their communities and who are finding creative ways to challenge the structures that impede the equal participation of women. Though much success has been achieved much remains to be done.