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Robinah Rubimbwa The guns are flying about us and around us. Women are actually organizing. Never give up the stubborn insistence that liberation is inevitable, because it is. (....)
Sanam That's Robinah Rubimbwa, the founder and national coordinator of the Coalition for Action on Resolution 1325, Co-Act 1325, in Uganda, a coalition of 64 peacebuilding organizations. Welcome to If You Were in Charge, with me, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini.
Kavita Ramdas And me, Kavita Nandini Ramdas.
Sanam So today, we're going to be talking about aid and decolonizing aid and all these issues around how, you know, the Western world or the wealthy world thinks that they're helping poor countries, right, and debunk some of the myths. But before we get there, can we talk World Cup maybe a little bit?
Kavita Ramdas Oh, I think we have to. I think we have to. And talk about, you know, Western world, not knowing the basics of civilizational hospitality. How about that?
Sanam Obviously, you know, there's the Iran team, which we need to talk about, which who weren't allowed to stay in the U.S., who had their visas. You know, one guy had his visa just for one entry. They were being harassed at immigration. (.) And genuinely, I was like, if this were the reverse and the Americans were coming to Iran, oh, my God, can you imagine how well they'd be treated? People would be inviting them to their houses for dinner every night and things. It's just civilization versus empire, which is how I see it, and a baby empire at that length.
Kavita Ramdas And the thing is, is that, you know, Iran, the way Iran's team was treated was sort of the worst of it. But the truth is, is that this was affecting so many others. Remember the wonderful referee from Somalia who was refused?
Sanam Exactly.
Kavita Ramdas He'd spent his whole life training for this moment. And then he was refused entry. And then they made some weird comment about, well, we're trying to treat all people from Somalia equally. And so therefore, we're not allowing him. And also just the distressing state of FIFA itself. I might have my opinions about how the U.S. government has been treating the teams. But also, I think FIFA has to take some responsibility.
Sanam The level of corruption and stuff, I think, is quite significant. The other part for me, which is interesting, is that you have this mass of humanity, you know, football fans, showing up in America, in different cities. From all over the world. From all over the world, with all of their music and all of their, you know, and the Tartan army and the Brazilians with their, you know, whatever.
Kavita Ramdas Oh, no, we had a man with bagpipes in my neighborhood just the other day, which I thought was just thoroughly charming.
Sanam At the Brazil-Scotland match, the Brazilian fans had made kilts for themselves. So I was just like, this is so cool. You know, it's like all this culture and, you know, sort of just popular kind of just...
Kavita Ramdas And, Sanam, you know, it does help to have New York City be run by a mayor who actually knows football. Oh, well, there you go. And doesn't even call it soccer. Calls it football. Yeah, calls it football.
Sanam Which is kind of wonderful. So I think all of that is really wonderful in terms of them coming to America. America and the Americans seeing them and then people seeing America. The Scots were doing these little clips on Instagram going into, like, Walmart and Costco and sort of holding a box of raisins saying... And the guy's like, this is as big as my head, you know, with this deep Scottish accent. And, you know, chicken in a can. And it's like, that's rank. And I was just like, I was like, it's fantastic. You know, they're looking at America with the eye of the, you know, through the gaze of the outsider. And it's madness.
Kavita Ramdas No, and then apropos of decolonization, I don't know if you've been observing, but, you know, the Democratic Republic of Congo made it in. Right? So it's not just Capo Verde, which was the little team that could, but the Democratic Republic of Congo. And at every one of the games, Sanam, there's this man who stands dressed like Patrice Lumumba. And the last time he stood, he stood with, like, a sort of a pretend gun to his hand and his hand over his mouth. And what's so interesting is that, you know, many of the sports reporting by U.S. papers have reported this man, but without any of the backstory. And you and I talked about the 1953 coup against Mossaddaq in an earlier episode. And this is a reference to the coup that the CIA and the Belgians used together to basically assassinate the first democratically elected prime minister of newly independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba. And so there's so many ways in which the World Cup has brought also a deeper understanding for Americans of a kind of world awareness. Yeah, if it's, yeah, if it's being shown. But if it's, yeah, absolutely. And if anybody actually knows what it refers to, which, of course, is a different issue.
Sanam And, you know, again, we know that in the States, when you say Latin America, they just think of, like, poor immigrants coming. And then to see Mexicans and Ecuador and Brazil and all these people coming and just being so joyful and just so, I don't know. I mean, it would be really wonderful to hear from Americans who've experienced this, what it was like for them.
Kavita Ramdas Well, I've definitely been talking to friends who've been at different matches and have, and also just observing on the streets. You know, we have so many people from all over the world. And if you walk into any bar in New York City these days, there's just this plethora of people from all over the world. So, but I don't know anymore if New York City, we're being told by the Democratic establishment that New York City does not represent the United States. And that electoral wins of two very young people in their 30s, defeating incumbents, and then Brad Lander winning all three candidates supported by Mamdani, that somehow this is not indicative of the Democratic parties. They made a statement saying, we are not socialists, we are capitalists. This was the main party saying this. This is the main party responding to these three amazing wins last week.
Sanam Yeah, yeah, as if anyone, I mean, even Mamdani with saying he's socialist, as if he's really social. I'm like, you don't understand what real socialists like.
Kavita Ramdas So what socialist is? I mean, I was like, do you think Sweden and Denmark and Norway and...
Sanam So I had somebody say to me, is Switzerland socialist? And I'm like, in which planet do you live in the fact that Switzerland, I mean, it's the...
Kavita Ramdas Well, because the notion that somehow providing free childcare makes you, you know, terrifyingly communist. So anyway, it's been interesting to watch, on the one hand, all the excitement about the World Cup and hoping that the United States is exposed to more people from more parts of the world. And then at the same time, continuing to see the rank lack of understanding.
Sanam I tell you, yeah, I feel as if we need to take issue by issue and then plot ourselves in terms of where we are situated and with whom we agree. I heard J.D. Vance the other night saying that, you know, he talked to Netanyahu and he's saying to them, you can't kill your way to security. And I'm like, yep, me and J.D., we're on the same page here. And I'm thinking, what is going on? You know, it's quite remarkable.
Kavita Ramdas Yeah, we've all been in a little bit of surreal world. I think I looked at the headlines of the New York Times today and they were like, well, these midterm elections are shaping up to be a bit alarming because, you know, there are rifts around Iran and Israel in both parties, both in the Democratic Party and in the Republican Party. And I think that's exactly right, Sanam, in some ways, what you and I have been saying and what the rest of the world has been saying for a while, which is, no, Gaza will not go away. Because actually Gaza is a, an ongoing, Gaza is, and it's an ongoing bloody wound that the rest of the world pretends is not sort of affecting the rest of us. And of course it is, so.
Sanam Bringing it to the conversation that we had with Rubina about peace and peace building and what they do on the, you know, at the local level, how obvious it is to say that if you're of a community or of a country, you have more interest and concern about making sure that there isn't violence and things don't fall apart than some outsider that flies in and out, right? Like, I mean, why do we have to explain this? But I was, I've been in a number of meetings recently where I found the conversation really disturbing. So in Germany and, and in the UK, because it was peace building week last week, UN peace building week. And literally I had somebody say to me, well, you know, in Germany, peace is toxic. And I was like, I'm sorry, what do you mean that peace is toxic? And then in the UK, it was like, well, you know, we have to make the case for peace. And I'm, and I, we're sitting in parliament and I found myself saying, well, you know, we take it for granted because if we didn't have peace, there might be a drone flying in here to kill everybody. I'm like, don't take it for granted. There is, of course, it's the baseline, it's the canvas on which we build our lives and peace is toxic. I mean, what does that mean? Because it, because of all this shift towards militarism and also that we don't care about other countries.
Kavita Ramdas Sanam, when I was in Germany a year or a year and a half ago, I went to a meeting organized by the Green Party. And it was really kind of astonishing because they began by saying, well, you know, when we were young people in our, in the seventies, we used to think that we had to get rid of nuclear weapons in order to bring peace. And now we understand that peace can only be achieved through weapons.
Sanam Yes, yes, exactly.
Kavita Ramdas And I thought, oh my God, am I sitting in Germany and listening to people arguing about why it was necessary not just to have weapons, but to have nuclear weapons so that we could actually have peace in the world. And I think that is where we are, which is why I felt the conversation with Robina was so inspiring and so grounding. (.) Because again, it's one thing to sit in these lofty rooms of political debate far away from the realities. And it's another thing to, for Robina to explain to us how she used, do you remember the amount, a tiny amount of a grant that she. $50,000 or $60,000 that we gave to her from 2018. ICANN, which went as a contribution to strengthening their youth activist program, you know, having, it's so funny because what immediately came to mind was the 100 and 104,000 youth volunteers that Mamdani managed to mobilize here in New York City. And I thought about Robina and her talking about all those young people who they had mobilized with that support from ICANN and how it's still going.
Sanam Yeah. And this is, so, so in the conversations I've been, on the one hand, I've been sort of in, at a forum in, in Morocco and it was the business sector and it was about investing in Morocco as a gateway to Africa. Very optimistic, which was great, but it was all about the hardware, like the roads and the, and the bridges and the rail. And I said, this is great. And you need the software, which are the human beings and, and it's investing in the human beings and their capacities to. Where's the human capital investment? To, to, to, to, you know, this resolving conflict or being of the community and sense of.
Kavita Ramdas But also because, as Robina said, they are not willing to make grants based on trust, based on trust with the local organizations. They want to dictate exactly who the grant should go to, how the grant should be used and give them no flexibility in being able to use the money.
Sanam You know, when I started the fund at ICANN, I'd been talking to the British government about the work that women were doing. And, and they said, oh, well, let's have a meeting in London. And I said, well, okay, we have a meeting in London. I bring these people from Iraq and Libya and then what? And they were like, oh, we've got our policy. So I said, I'm not going to bring these people. It's dangerous for them. So then we went, it took 18 months. Finally, they were like, oh, you know, we should do a challenge. What, yeah, let's see whether if we support, you know, based on the pilot grant making that we'd done. So we show up, a Libyan, a Nigerian, a Syrian, an Iraqi. I mean, it was like, it was like one of these jokes where, you know, these people go walk into a bar and, and, but we walk into the offices of DFID and the foreign office. And they kept saying to us, well, you know, the appetite for risk is low and these are difficult times. And I kept looking around and saying, risk, what are they talking about? And then finally I clicked, I was like, oh, brown people, women, right? I flipped it and I said, your risk is, you think that if you unpack risk, it's, you think these people are either incompetent to manage money, corrupt, they're going to pocket it, or they're somehow aligned with terrorism. So I said, well, why don't we talk about your appetite for trust? Because they are risking their lives. Your money is nothing compared to what, what they're putting on the table in terms of their knowledge of their societies, their access and the trust and so forth. And so why not talk about appetite for trust? And so that's how we framed it as investing in trust. Again, it's been, it's tough because you're still dealing with a mindset that, that people over there don't know how to do budgets or they're going to steal the money. And, and it just, you know.
Kavita Ramdas Well, it was very refreshing to hear Robina spell it out so clearly, because I think for people like you and me, I spent 14 years at the Global Fund for Women. I serve on the board of the Global Green Grants Fund, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which gives grants to so many of its member associations. All of these organizations are now under very deep scrutiny. All of them are being asked not to follow this approach of giving with trust. And I think Robina's commentary, and actually, more importantly, her, her examples of impact, testimony to why, in fact, the people who are unwilling to take risk are so wrong.
Sanam It's, and so many organizations have now just become contractors for these governments. Yes, yes. And so they, they're getting money to go off and do, I don't know, whatever, track two diplomacy or humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan or Yemen or wherever it might be. And they don't want to lose that money, so they refuse to actually speak loud on actual policies vis-a-vis Gaza or vis-a-vis recognizing the Taliban, which is not coming back into fashion, right? Or sending Syrians back into Syria, because now we have a government that we like. the fact that he's al-Qaeda and he's pretty rapidly undermining the rights of women and the rights of minorities. Oh, but, Sanam, how could we possibly hold to our own principles?
Robinah Rubimbwa Surely you don't expect consistency. Well, there you go. There you go.
Kavita Ramdas Well, I think, on the other hand, we are, our listeners are going to love this conversation we had with Robina. I think it's going to, certainly left me with a sense of optimism and hope, and also a sense that there is a whole new generation of people who they have engaged with, mentored, and then sort of sent out into the world to kind of be these ripples of change.
Sanam You know, what I love about Robina, I've been working with her for many years, is that I asked her once why she got involved in this work, and she said that she had become a refugee and she was, she had to flee her country with her two little kids, and she never wanted anybody to have that experience. And this is, this is one of the things that is so consistent with our partners in the peacebuilding world, and generally as activists, that you've had a horrible experience. And the reaction is, I don't want anyone else experiencing this. You'll have to go through this again. And I think this is something that we, again, it's so important, because so many people become defensive, or they become aggrieved, or they think that they need to...
Kavita Ramdas I mean, we could think of a few countries that have been behaving in that way, couldn't we?
Sanam Yeah, yeah, and we can think of a few, you know, wannabe princes who think that as well in my part of the world. And just, I have to end on this, just the idiocy, I have to, I just have to say this. So this man, who's never had a job, whose father was the king for, you know, 25 years... Are we back to Iran now? Back to Iran, back to Iran, sorry, sorry. He's just been on an interview, saying, trying to take credit, saying, if it wasn't for my visit to Israel, we wouldn't have had Israel and the U.S., you know, willing to go to war against the Islamic regime. I'm like, dude, you've just implicated yourself in war crimes. I mean, didn't anybody tell him that? That these are just my little...
Kavita Ramdas Don't you wish we could, we could bottle Robina and put her into a sort of a waterbury compound and make him take two tablespoons every day, might stick in his throat going down.
Sanam Anybody who is feeling pessimistic about the state of the world, they should come to the ICANN forum, or they should... Yes! And just, or read our Peace Heroes stories on our website, icanpeacework.org, just to put it out there. Because these women just give, just are so inspiring. And they are so much fun. And they're just so, they're the best of humanity. Oh, I feel the same.
Kavita Ramdas I think, I think the same thing. We're so lucky. And I just had the opportunity to listen to all these amazing member associations from all over the world at the International Planned Parenthood Federation meeting in Dublin. And I just thought, here's a country that just managed to legalize abortion, legalize gay marriage after all of their craziness. And then here were people providing reproductive and sexual rights and services to people all over the world. So, yes, this is why our podcast is about people, power, and possibilities. //Sanam: Yeah.// And I think we're going to have so much fun hearing about them from our latest guests.
Sanam And that liberation is inevitable, as she does, because... It surely is. It sure is. We're bending that arc, or all our guests are for anything, in any case. Anyway, it was great. //Kavita : Thank you. Well, lovely to check in with you.// Yes, you too. Bye. (........) Robina Robimwe, my love and my very good friend from Uganda, founder and national coordinator of the Coalition for Action on Resolution 1325, COACT 1325. It's so lovely to have you here with us.
Robinah Rubimbwa So glad to be here, Sanam. Thank you for the invitation.
Kavita Ramdas And welcome, Robina.
Sanam And nice to see you again, Karita. Likewise. Robina, you call yourself a feminist, you're a poet, you're an educator, you do mediation, you do peace activism, you've done conflict resolution, you've been involved in peace negotiations issues. So here you are with this incredible wealth of knowledge and experience and expertise. You are a global expert. And yet, the tendency for the international aid mindset being that these outsiders come in and they have the expertise and they know what's best and, you know, they're perpetually trying to empower you. (.)
Robinah Rubimbwa No outsider can empower any woman in Uganda. That's out of the question. No outsider can empower a woman in India or Pakistan or Kenya, for that matter. (.) Empowerment grows from within. And it is built and sustained by the local realities around that individual and the community structures that exist in any community. Because empowerment is not the clothes that you come and wear it and then you are empowered. So that doesn't happen. What international aid does is to bring in funding that is badly needed in Africa, again, because of history, you know, the history of exploitation. (.) So when they bring in funding, the funding should go to organizations that understand the reality on the ground, that understand the local context, that respect the local structures on the ground, that women whom they target will trust because aid will be meaningless if the communities they are targeting do not trust the person that is bringing the aid. (.) So what we have is that a lot of the funds are going to international NGOs, they are going to UN agencies and then organizations like Co-Act. Mind you, the Coalition for Action on 1325 is a coalition of 64 peace-building organizations. 64. It is not a small organization. They come and they want to treat us like a hawker, you know, or at best a contractor or a conduit, you know, for funding. This business of sitting in whatever city in the world and you design a program, you have your outcomes, you have your outputs, you have your strategies. (.) You even tell us 150 women, these days they even have the audacity to tell us which districts of Uganda. (.) And you do that because, you know, you can get a lot of information using AI. AI and then you come to Co-Act and you say, I'm giving you so much money, this is the project and I'm going to pay salaries for three staff and I'll give you 20% for your overhead costs. (.) That is not technical assistance. (.) That is not financial assistance. (.) That is colonialism. (..) And we need to decolonize aid. We need to decolonize aid. (.) I do a lot of training and I'm proud. My background is actually in teaching. So I do a lot of training. The knowledge, the skills that you give transform an individual's mind if they are willing to get transformed. And that is what leads to empowerment. (.) That the individual is ready to say, yeah, I have learned this, I will apply it. I have gained this skill, I will apply it. And by applying it, I will change myself, I will change my family, I will change my community. That is empowerment.
Kavita Ramdas You said aid, the way aid is structured right now is colonialism. (.) And yet, here we are in a moment where so many of our organizations, including Co-Act, including so many others, are at risk precisely because this very imperfect and deeply colonial structure called aid itself is being withdrawn. And it's being withdrawn, ironically, so that those governments can spend more of their money on defense and weapons and buying fighter jets and drones. So I'm wondering, how are the local organizations, you said this is a coalition of so many organizations, organizations, how are you dealing with this new situation? How are you managing? Because imperfect as aid was, it was, as you said, the resources are desperately needed. Could you say a bit about how you are managing in this moment of crisis?
Robinah Rubimbwa It's difficult to say the least. It's difficult. We had to lay off seven staff, seven, because we could no longer afford them. (.) You know, in this country, when you see people employed, whether they are employed on a construction site or on the road or in an organization like Co-Act, behind them are families. (..) The salary that they get, no matter how small, it is supporting a family. (.) So when you lay off seven, they are not seven individuals. They are seven families. And it is heartbreaking for any leader, for any leader. So that's a difficult decision that we have had to take, because some of the programs had to be closed. So many organizations in Uganda are in the same boat, like Co-Act.
Sanam You know, one of the things that we're all struggling with, both internationally, but also at the national level, locally, is that our sector is so misunderstood. You do so much around violence prevention, and it's so hard to capture. But I'm just wondering, for you, what are your highlights that you could say, this is what I do, this is how I do it, this is the long-term effect that it has, and this is why the money goes such a long way?
Robinah Rubimbwa The money that we receive goes into strengthening local structures on the ground that prevent conflict, that resolve conflict, that improve people's welfare, that enable transitional justice processes to happen in post-conflict areas. In a nutshell, that's what we do. So we have created networks of community-based women mediators. (.) We have trained them thoroughly, and they have been amazed. They have amazed the local authority leaders. They have amazed the judiciary in the way they are able to mediate conflicts at the local level. Whether these are land-related conflicts, which are the majority, or whether they are political conflicts, or whether they are conflicts between families, whether it is domestic violence. They have been able to mediate these conflicts. When you talk to local authorities about the work of women mediators in this country, in the districts where you work, the leaders are in awe of the impact these women have created. That's one. When you talk about the youth, you remember our youth elections observatory in 2021, which was the first elections observatory in the world, because we create models of good practice that can be replicated elsewhere. We mobilized young people. This was at a time when everybody regarded young people as, you know, naive, as lazy, as incompetent, that they didn't care, that they were difficult, that they only caused trouble. And true, many have caused a lot of trouble, and many have been radicalized, but we said, no, there is, we can change this narrative. We can get young people to be peace builders, to be change makers, to transform their communities. And so with all the leadership and peace building boot camps and all the training and sending them out into villages as elections monitors and elections observers accredited by the electoral commission, oh, it was very transformative. Not only for these individuals, but for their families and other youths that saw them work. work. As I speak now, many of the youth organizations that were established at the time, they have huge, huge numbers of young people. We trained only six from each district, but many of them now are over 100 in their association. That is transformation. And they are busy doing other things. They applied the knowledge. They applied the skills. After the elections, they went into peace building work. They are holding community dialogues. They are visiting schools to talk to girls to stay in school. They are talking about sanitary hygiene. They have established climate change resilience initiatives in their communities. They are protecting riverbanks in their communities to combat flooding. They are conducting civic education on rights, on the right to vote, on the right to be a candidate. They don't, you, you look at this change and you say, my God, this is transformative.
Sanam And that is what we call empowerment. I was, we were so proud of the support we were able to give you for the, for the $60,000. But it was really difficult because afterwards it was scrambling to find extra money, right? To be able to extend it. But still the, the fact that four years, five years later, this work is still going on just makes my heart sing. Thank you. Thank you for, for, for, for telling us that. these local peace committees, again, what's the dollar amount we're talking about? Because here we are talking about international aid and billions of dollars, which frankly, we all know over the years, those billions of dollars, a lot of it never reached local communities. It was, it was just recycled back into Western organizations or their overheads in Washington or the supplies that they provided. You're talking about the software. You're talking about the human capacity. Yeah. Um, and the, and the political will and, and those can, what, what does it cost? Because this is violence prevention, which has huge impact in terms of development and economic, uh, prosperity going, going forward, right? What, what's the investment that you're talking about?
Robinah Rubimbwa So now, if you gave me $50,000, I would be able to establish a minimum of nine women mediator networks. And each network is 20 women. Let me tell you what is happening now. We go to one sub-county in a particular location and we train women mediators and they start doing work at community level. And then the, the sub-county chief of the next sub-county where no women mediators were trained starts approaching these women to go and help them. So the women are not only mediating work in their own sub-county, but they are crossing, crisscrossing into sub-counties. And you know what? They are doing it for free. No one is giving them a thing. (.) No one. No one. And so when I talk about the 50,000, I would want the women mediators not only to receive the training, but also to receive a kit, a working kit that they can use, a pair of boots that protect their feet against rain and harm and mud, an umbrella, a folder in which they can, can keep register and protect their data. When they bring this data, it goes to the Ministry of Gender and informs the database of the nation. Their work is, it goes to the African Union. Their work is what the data that our minister presents at CSW. It is created by these local women in the community. So we are talking about small funds. We are not talking about a lot of funds. We have learned to stretch the shilling. When I come to New York, I tell you that we stretch the dollar. In the country here, we stretch the shilling. Of course. As women, you do.
Sanam Yeah.
Robinah Rubimbwa Yeah. Every year, our auditor cannot believe, every auditor we have gotten, they cannot believe the amount of work we are able to do with the resources that we get. They cannot believe it because women do stretch the money. So I'm glad I'm on this podcast because honestly, we need funds for women. And as you talk, as you talk, Karita, right now, what is happening, many organizations are struggling. Our work has shrunk. But also, we are aware of the global pushback against gender equality, which is happening. //Kavita : Exactly.//
Kavita Ramdas And Robina, this global cutback is happening at every level. I just heard yesterday, Sanam, that one of the largest foundations that has been funding women's rights globally, the Foundation for a Just Society, has just announced cuts to over 110 organizations, including to the African Women's Development Fund and the Urgent Action Fund and many others, like ICANN, which are considered by endowed foundations to be intermediaries, which is very ironic because those large foundations would never make a $60,000 grant to the youth training program that you just described, Robina. So I think you're right. We are in a very scary crisis in which everyone seems to have agreed that gender is not important anymore. Women's rights are not important anymore. It's old news and we can move on. So thank you for raising that. And yes, I think it's important for us to continue to do this work.
Robinah Rubimbwa Yeah, and yet the irony is that they are spending more money on military hardware and causing more conflict and causing more violence, even as they are defunding women's organizations.
Sanam Robina, one of, I just wrote an article about UN reform and how UN reform without women and specifically in the context of peace and security, without the women, peace and security agenda being really elevated, is not going to be reform. It's going to be regression to a place we've never seen before.
Robinah Rubimbwa Yes, yes.
Sanam For the simple reason that actually, if you look back to over 100 years of multilateralism, right? I'm not even talking about the history of women in Uganda or India or Iran, where we all have very rich history of women's participation in political life. I'm talking about kind of from the League of Nations to the creation of the UN, all the way to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Women from around the world have been consistently saying, we want representation at the table and representation on issues of war and peace, actually, like going back to the League of Nations. And yet here we are, we have one generation that is sitting with this entire legacy and they are very callously and very casually chopping and chomping and erasing. So the agenda is getting lost at the highest levels. And yet you're telling us that this is one of the most effective, both from a violence prevention, peace building and cost effective agendas that has existed. What would, what would you say to, to, to the folks that are doing UN reform right now? What's what, you know, if you, if you were in charge, if you were in charge, Robinette, what would you say about, about how UN reform should work and how this agenda should be situated? (...)
Robinah Rubimbwa If I were in charge, leave alone the UN reform, I would make sure that there is a global council for Women, Peace and Security that works in tandem with the UN. (.) And this council would be made up of at least 60% women from civil society because these other guys don't get it. The bureaucrats don't get it. They just don't get it. But if the UN reform had included consultation from civil society, and I'm talking about meaningful consultation, not tokenism, that tokenistic consultation that we have seen. You know, they send an email to UN women at the regional office and they send a survey and they are asking these questions that do not address issues on the ground. And you call that consultation and they make their presentation and it is ignored. I think it is a shame that the UN is taking this route and they are defunding organizations and agencies that work with women's rights organizations, even as they continue to increase their own overhead costs and what have you. I think it is a shame. I look at the levels of funding that come to Uganda, you know, from bilateral agencies, from governments, bilateral governments. A huge chunk of those funding stay at UN headquarters. (.) They stay at the headquarters. (.) And then the region is given some and then very small comes to the country office in Uganda. That trickle down kind of governance that goes to organizations like COACT to go and do this building work. If I were in charge, I would put an end to that. If I were in charge, I would create a fund for peace. I would create a fund for peace and compare governments to contribute to that fund that will be accountable to the Council on Women, Peace and Security. I was disappointed that we have another man. I mean, how long will it take to get women in the top 50% positions of the UN, at least 40% of those positions being women? How long is it going to take us? How long? And so we get these people who are the leaders, you know, in New York, and they will see it with the heads of governments who are men like them. They discuss it. (..) It stinks. It stinks. (..)
Kavita Ramdas Well, Robina, we have a very good brief now that we can take to, if anybody from the UN ever decides to talk to us, we can offer them your brief about what you'd do if you were in charge. Yes. (.)
Sanam And not only that, as you were speaking, I was like, well, we have the Women's Alliance for Security Leadership. We have our forum coming up in September. We have a fund. We know how to run money. Yes. Let's just make it. Let's just, we don't have to make, we don't have to wait for them. We just do it. We invite. Yes. And we, and I think that's it. So, so I was going to ask you, what is a radical idea that should not be radical? But I think that maybe we've already covered this ground.
Robinah Rubimbwa That's one of them. But I think I have a lot of radical ideas now. Go for it. One of the things is that I would make, I would make care and joy human rights. (..) I would want them to be human rights, not, not like Janice. Care and joy. (..) If I were in charge, I would definitely do that. If I were in charge, I would make sure that leadership is collective. (..) That leadership is collective. That the words of the country is returned to communities. It is not hoarded by individuals. We need to colonize wealth and return it to the people.
Sanam This conversation about wealth, and to me, it's not aid, it's investment. I think this is one of the shifts that we have to think about. And it's, we're investing in the future. Whereas the weapons is definitely not investment. The weapons is just lining the pockets of a handful of shareholders, genuinely. Because if those weapons are used, it's bad for all of us. And so long as they stockpile them, there's just a handful of people making the money. But one of the, one of the terminological issues that we have is we at ICANN often, we talk about locally led and globally connected. And we think it's very important that what you do in Uganda is based on your knowledge and your expertise. And we are investing in the trust that you have in your communities. And we trust you to know and do well. But the language from an international side is very much framed around localization, which is still slightly top down. And then the attitude of, well, we don't need international organizations like ICANN and others. Why not go directly to a co-act and so forth? What's the value of having these entities as part of the ecosystem or the structure that we have?
Robinah Rubimbwa If I didn't belong to ICANN, I would never have met Kavita. (.) I met her on my way to an African Women's Development Fund conference in Zambia. The value of this structure that is below the giants is that we know that these giants, are very risk-averse, they are risk-averse, they don't want fund co-act because they think, oh, this little African organization, they do not have systems in place, they don't even have competent staff, they don't understand policies, they won't be accountable, you know, if we audit, we'll find they have taken all the money. That is the attitude. And it is going to take a long time to change. But an organization like the African Women's Development Fund, like ICANN, (.) you have a globally proven record of managing funds, of mobilizing organizations that do the work on the ground and making sure that these organizations are the ones that receive flexible funding from you. And we do the work that you trust us to do with the funds that you give us. And so then, that cuts away a lot of red tape from us, from co-acts, because these complicated audit processes, you manage them. We deal with audit processes that suit you, that suit ICANN and suit co-acts. (.) Then we are not going to be filling all these big frameworks and templates and what have you, month after month and quarter after quarter. I mean, there is so much that we can do, and we are doing that because we are protected from this bureaucratic engagement, this bureaucratic engagement. And so, you have a major role to play, but you also enhance our capacity for networking. I have friends in India. I have friends in Iraq. I have friends in Tunisia. Where would I have found them? I don't know whether you are aware that we do a lot of cross-exchange without even informing you. We contact each other. We share knowledge when we are writing grant proposals. We share ideas. We brainstorm. We don't inform you. You have created the network. You are sustaining the network that is growing our national level networks. So, if anybody says I can get out of the way, we shall fight hard.
Sanam Thank you. Well, you're going to make me cry. For two reasons. One, because we, as you said, the bureaucracy that we and the staff at ICANN are dealing with now just gets worse and worse and worse, and they're heroes for putting up with it. But we're now in our 20th year, and I remember when we first created the idea of a locally rooted, globally connected alliance, we were thinking, you know, we really want people to learn from each other and connect. And it takes time. It just takes time for people to get to know each other. And now when you say you guys are doing it without us, partly I have FOMO, obviously, because I'm like, hey, I want to know what's going on. This is exactly what it was meant to be, that it is meant to be about enabling the synapses to connect with each other. Without that is also empowerment of an alliance. But as you say, we're in an environment right now where all of us are having to prove why we exist and what's the value of what we do and what happens if everybody disappears. And it's shocking that our own governments are not pushing back and doubling down on the investment.
Kavita Ramdas And even our private foundations, I think what you just described, Robyn, I wish I could put it in a little envelope and send it to the multiple private foundations that have shut down their programs on supporting women's rights globally. And in particular, your articulation of the role of what they call, and I actually hate that word, intermediary. It's not that we are intermediaries, it's that we see ourselves, organizations like the Global Fund for Women, like the African Women's Development Fund, like ICANN, like the Urgent Action Fund for Women. These are organizations that came out of women's movements. They were started by people who were part of women's movements, precisely for the reasons you just described, which is we understood that the large foundations and the large bilaterals would never give money flexibly, would never give that money with trust. I think ultimately what you described was a description of what does it mean to see philanthropy both as an investment, which is what Sanam talked about, aid should be, and in a way I would say reparations for hundreds of years of colonial extraction and exploitation, and as a authentic relationship of trust between people who recognize that we may have financial resources in the Western world, but the people on the ground who are doing work like co-actors have extraordinary expertise, have extraordinary understanding of the local situation, and they can really translate that into transformation, which you described, lasting transformation. (.)
Sanam A big question that we always ask people is, what gives you hope? (.)
Robinah Rubimbwa That refusal of silence. I like that women have refused to be silent, and we have created our own platforms where we are speaking. We no longer want somebody else to represent us, we want to represent ourselves in those spaces. So that gives me hope. The other one is the courage and the creativity of young people. I see the young people that we work with in Uganda, the young women, the young men, the ideas they have, their eagerness to work with my generation to teach us how to use IT tools. You know, they are energy. Oh, that gives me a lot of hope. Then the other one is the organizing of grassroots women. The organizing of the grassroots women around a field and collecting themselves. And they go and plow a field and plant their nays, organizing in VSLA groups, organizing in savings and credit association groups, organizing around an issue as mediators, organizing to go and visit another woman who has lost a member of the family. The level of organizing of women in Africa, we call it even under fire. When the guns are flying about us and around us, women are actually organizing. I saw that here during elections in Uganda. At any local polling stations, there were women observing from a distance. They had their phones calling other women to see there is fire here. This has happened. So this never give up the stubborn insistence that liberation is inevitable, because it is. (.) So that is what gives me hope now. (.)
Kavita Ramdas Now, Robina, your role as a poet becomes clear to me. (.) Yes, yes, the stubborn insistence and I would say that we should have you as a late candidate
Sanam for the Secretary General of the United Nations, frankly. We need you in there, my friend. But no, it's a joy to speak with you. And I know that this has been a difficult period otherwise in life. And it's just it's you give us so much energy and so much inspiration. And I'm always so grateful for being able to be part of your ecosystem and to visit your country and and to travel with you and and and so forth. And hopefully we'll do it again soon.
Kavita Ramdas But now, Robina, we have a Ugandan in the mayor's office in New York City, another young person who gives us hope. Yes, yeah.
Robinah Rubimbwa Oh, yes. Oh, yes. That young person gives us a lot of hope. Let him give them a run for their money.
Kavita Ramdas Yes, yes, indeed. //Robinah : Well, thank you so much from both of us.//
Robinah Rubimbwa Thank you. It's a pleasure to. Right. (...)
Sanam This was If You're in Charge, a podcast brought to you by ICANN, the International Civil Society Action Network. Get in touch and tell us what you think at info at ICANNpeacework.org and follow our newsletter. Like and subscribe. And please tell everybody else who might like the show. My thanks to ADA Productions for making the show possible. to a little monster media for our music. And of course, to my amazing co-host, Kavita Nandini Ramdas. And finally, to all of you for listening. We'll be back soon. Thank you.