Author: Hjördis Höglund
Last saved by: Paweł Żaboklicki

VI UBC GENERAL CONFERENCE

UBC WOMEN’S NETWORK

Activity Report October 1999 – September 2001

   
The  UBC has during the last two years taken some important steps on its way towards the goal of integrating a gender perspective into all the activities of the organisation.
Gender equality is now integrated in the UBC Strategy and the General Guidelines.
A gender mainstreaming method is introduced into the UBC Local Agenda 21 work and the UBC Executive Board has decided to go on with using the same method for analysing the gender equality work in all the activities of the organisation. 
It is now necessary to follow up the decisions in the current UBC work and translate the words into deeds.
For this work there is a need for knowledge and strong support for the gender equality issues within the organisation.

Activity Report October 1999 – September 2001

“Gender equality in local Agenda 21.”  EU-project within the UBC Women’s   Network.
The contacts within the Network have been used when creating the EU- project “Gender equality in local Agenda 21”, which was going on for 15 months, from autumn 1999 to the end of 2000.
The cities Lahti, Finland, Lübeck, Germany and Sundsvall, Sweden participated in the work. Non - EU countries could not participate in this project but the result has been introduced into the UBC Local Agenda 21 Group (UBC LA21) and has become spread this way to all the UBC member cities. 

UBC Women's Network meeting in Siauliai , 2-3 June 2000.
The city of Siauliai invited the contact persons of UBC Women's Network of Lithuania to a  seminar,  2-3 June, 2000.
It was as the representative of Lithuania in the UBC Board, Siauliai took this       
initiative. 
It was a good initiative from the city and it is desirable that all the UBC Board members, representatives for the different countries, would  invite to similar   
meetings.

Cooperation with other actors and networks.
UBC Women’s Network has started a discussion about cooperation with the network Femina Baltica, a project with the aim to build up long-term and large-scale cooperation of women at all levels in societies around the Baltic Sea.
We are both working in the same region with the same target groups and with the same goals: support of the democratic development in the Baltic Sea countries by increasing the gender equality knowledge. Cooperation will strengthen both the networks. 
Femina Baltica has its base at the Women’s Centre in Turku.

The Women's Resource Centres in the cities of Norrköping and  Norrtälje have been cooperating with the UBC Women's Network in an EU-project called  BalticFem. 
It was three conferences in the project plan, two in Sweden, in Luleĺ and Norrköping,  and the third one in Rostock, January 2001.
BalticFem is an information campaign focusing on the enlargement process and the opportunities for women in the Baltic States, created within the framework of Agenda 2000. The overall aim is to give women, living in Sweden as well as in other Baltic States, especially the candidate countries, information about the EU, Agenda 2000 and the gender equality work within the EU.
The project is planned to continue with new initiatives.

The next interesting step is the cooperation with the newly started  LVRLAC Women’s Network  in Africa..( LVRLAC = Lake Victoria Region Local Authorities Cooperation.)
The UBC has been chosen by the Swedish International Development Authority, SIDA, to assist the cities around Lake Victoria to form a similar organisation.
This supportive work will start with five concrete activities and one of them is the creation of a Women’s Network. 
In February, 2001, a two day seminar was held in the city of Entebbe in Uganda. 
15 women met, representing member cities of LVRLAC in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, the countries with borders on Lake Victoria. The women at the seminar decided to create the LVRLAC Women’s Network and adopted a document in which they stated, that “The Women’s Network desires to be a strong part of LVRLAC”.  
During a project period of 3 years, UBC and UBC Women’s Network will support the development of LVRLAC Women’s Network.

Gender mainstreaming in the UBC.
In the project “Gender Equality in Local Agenda 21”, the gender mainstreaming method “3R” was used.  This method is an analytical tool, in order to produce information needed to gender mainstream an operation in a systematic way. By answering questions under the headings Representation, Resources and Realia, (the 3 R:s) activities can be analysed from a gender equality perspective. The analysis shows how power is shared between women and men and how gender aspects affect the activities.
The 3R method for the gender equality work can be used within many different fields, not only in the Agenda 21 work. 
A joint proposal was therefore sent from the UBC LA Group and UBC Women’s Network to the UBC Executive Board Meeting in Cesis, Latvia, 16-17 March, 2001.
The suggestion was that UBC will use the 3R-method for analyses of the gender equality work in all its activities. The Board adopted the proposal.
The 3R-method is a practical way to analyse the gender equality perspective in the UBC work and this UBC Board decision is one more step forward in the gender equality work.

Gender equality in the UBC Strategy and General Guidelines.
In the UBC Strategy it is said that equality between men and women is an issue of great importance in the cooperation.
At the Executive Board Meeting in St.Petersburg in June 2000, the UBC Action Plan 2000-2001 was decided. 
In the General Guidelines of this plan it is now written:  “All the UBC activities, in the Board, in each Commission, Working group and Network, as well as other organs, shall contribute to gender equality (gender mainstreaming

During the period the UBC Women’s Network has been represented at the following conferences
-"Conference on Women and Democracy at the Dawn of the New  Millennium", in     
   Reykjavik,   8-10 Oct.1999. 
-  and the follow-up conference in Vilnius, named “WoMen and Democracy” in   
   Vilnius, 15-17  June 2001.
-  The 2^nd Baltic Sea Women's Conference in Helsinki, 9-11 March, 2000,
   with the name  "Gender equality and the future". UBC  
   Women's Network was one of the members of the Programme Committee for   
    the conference.
- The BalticFem Conference in Norrköping, 23 November 2000.

Action Plan 2002-2003.

The work within the UBC Women’s Network during the next two years and forward is depending on the negotiations with other UBC member cities about the responsibility for the Network. The City of Sundsvall wants that some other city/cities will take the leading role for the work.
There are discussions going on with the City of Turku and I hope that they will be successful.

Sundsvall 21 September 2001

Hjördis Höglund
Coordinator UBC Women’s Network