A campaign dubbed “Women for a World Free from the Fundamentalisms” will be launched in time for the International Women’s Day on March 8, this year. A product of women’s collective ideas during the 2007 World Social Forum, this campaign is only one of many others that feminists are currently planning to work on.

Feminists attending the World Social Forum (WSF) 2007 in Nairobi, Kenya will be launching a campaign called “Women for a World Free from Fundamentalisms.” This campaign emerged after wide-ranging consultations among participants at the forum. The campaign will be launched through global action on March 8, 2007, and sustained throughout the year supported by a blog site.

Other plans include organising an international conference where fundamentalism and its implications, and another event to discuss fundamentalism in relation to sexual and reproductive rights.

The process of coming up with a global campaign highlighted the processes which make the WSF the best venue for networking among like-minded people seeking social change. Activist networks consolidated energies and combined strengths to propose strategies for action for the coming year during the WSF programme on January 23, 2007. People working on 21 different themes such as water, land rights, and human rights, met and strategised in the morning and came together in a broader gathering in the afternoon. For the feminists attending the WSF, this was an opportunity to plan campaigns and actions on the most pressing issues facing women around the world.

Towards the end of the workshop, participants agreed to work on five different themes: bodies and sexuality, labour and neoliberalisms, militarism and violence against women, media as a means of strengthening globalisation and fundamentalism, and transforming democracies.

Some of the proposed slogans were:
- “Stop corporate control of our bodies, labour sexualities”
- “Defend our personal and social sovereignties”
- “Roll back the power of transnational corporations”
- “There is no democracy without women”

It was agreed in the end that media was also a crosscutting issue, and that each of the campaigns would need to address how media carries agenda and ideologies that lead to women’s oppression.

For more details about the “Women for a World Free from Fundamentalisms” campaign, write to Bina Srinivasan of INFORM, a human rights organisation that advocates for the promotion and protection of human rights for all, at <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>.