Peru – Women’s Popular Kitchens Lead to Advocacy & Leadership

Peru – Women’s Popular Kitchens Lead to
Grassroots Social Advocacy & Civic Leadership

Peru’s community kitchens, or
comedores populares, have provided food and a social space to the urban poor
since the 1960s, as streams of rural migrants left their homes in search of
work, often settling in squatter communities with few basic services. 
In an effort to build food security in their communities, women formed
cooking collectives, bought produce in bulk and created large kitchens that
became not only hubs for distributing food to low-income families, but spaces
for neighborhood organizing on a range of community development issues.

This story looks at how CONAMOVIDI, a
national movement of women’s popular kitchens, empowered women at a popular
kitchen in a small town recovering from the 2007 earthquake to negotiate with
local authorities on the implementation of Peru’s Law of Equal Opportunities.

The national network of CONAMOVIDI
organizes coordinators from more than 10.000 popular kitchens across Peru,
which have long moved beyond a single focus on food distribution, to
facilitating projects that empower women to take on citizen leadership roles.

CONAMOVIDI is connected to numerous
other women’s networks in the country. Among them is GROOTS Peru, an umbrella
organization formed in order to have a stronger presence in international
forums with GROOTS International, and which participated in Huairou’s MDG 3
Initiative in 2008. “CONAMOVIDI has been working to increase grassroots
women’s awareness that they are not only housewives or mothers, but bearers
of rights – women and citizens,” explains Relinda Sosa, a representative
of CONAMOVIDI who recently spoke as part of a UN-Habitat-sponsored panel
during the Millennium Development Goal Summit in New York.  

Sosa joined a popular kitchen in Lima
in the 1980s to provide for her family and now works on behalf of thousands
of women as a coordinator of CONAMOVIDI’s national campaigns. In one such
campaign, a pilot-project introduced in the popular kitchen in the small town
of Cañete, 15 local women were involved in negotiations with local
authorities around the implementation of Peru’s Law of Equal Opportunities.
Through a series of workshops supported by Huairou’s MDG 3 Initiative, women
were trained to become “rights advocates” (promotoras de derechos)
in areas like health and education, increasing women’s roles in service
delivery in Cañete.

But the transformative effect of the
workshops went beyond increasing women’s involvement in local government – it
also changed their perception of their roles in the house. “One of the
senior leaders at the kitchen was very active in her community,” recalls
Sosa of one of the participants. “She was used to engaging in
discussions around participatory budgeting and economic initiatives, but she
realized she had never questioned her position at home. She was only able to
be a community leader after finishing her housework and cooking for her
husband.” From the workshops, the women took away an understanding that
women’s rights extends to her sharing household tasks with men in order to
fully reach her own potential. “Today the same woman is a community
housing advocate.”

The Cañete example is but one of many
in a series of initiatives across Latin America, Africa and Asia that illustrate
how empowering women at the community level is the first step to increasing
women’s participation in local and national decision-making processes. Peer
learning and collective problem solving form the basis for women’s confidence
to become actors in their communities and beyond. For this reason, the
Huairou Commission, with support from the Dutch Foreign Ministry’s MDG3 Fund,
has prioritized investing in the capacities of local women’s organizations to
expand existing knowledge and connect women to government processes.

Relinda Sosa herself is an example of
the potential of locally-active women to become national and international
change agents in matters affecting grassroots women the world over. She and
other members of CONAMOVIDI will join women’s organizations from Bolivia,
Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil in Cochabamba, Bolivia, this week for the
international conference titled Exchange on Land and Housing Tenure and
Finance for Women in Latin America, from October 8^th to 11^th.

The Huairou Commission encourages
international leaders serious about improving the fragile position of women
world wide, to look at the successes booked through women-led exchanges like
these, and actively support existing women’s organizations and initiatives in
the years to come.