PGN-Harvard Roundtable
The fall has come and we are preparing for the next roundtable, which promises to be very interesting. Dr. Marshall Ganz, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and world-renowned expert on leadership development, public policy advocacy and community organizing, will present a workshop on leadership and advocacy tools. This will be followed by the Gender and Economic Policy Research Analysis (GERPA) Conference. An initiative between CAWTAR and the World Bank aimed to strengthen the policy research on gender and economics. The GERPA conference will showcase some of the completed studies. View the schedule. The preparation for this conference started in June. A call for submission of presentations was circulated. And 16 appealing research abstracts was received for four slots. The PGN research committee made the final selections. We are in the early stage of establishing a grant proposal initiative to provide promising researchers with seed money. We would like to encourage you to provide feed back.
In other News:
Entrepreneurs
The Women's Council director in the Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, and Mines (TCCIM) stated that an agreement had been signed between an Iranian businesswoman and the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). Fatemeh Moqhimi was accompanied by a delegation to Malaysia consisting of some members of the Council. She stated that they signed a draft with the Council and IIUM aimed to advance educational opportunities for women entrepreneurs. "In consideration of the increasing number of Iranian students who go to Malaysia we deemed it suitable to create some facilities through the TCCIM for students and IIUM agreed to this," she said. The details of these facilities will be announced later.
Panels
Roxana Bahramitash organized two conference panels in 2009. The first panel, titled Religion and Development in the Middle East and North Africa, was held at the Canadian Studies for International Development Conference in Ottawa. This panel was partly funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The second panel,titled Women's Economic Empowerment: Challenges and Opportunities in Persian Speaking Communities took place during the International Feminist Economics Conference in Boston, June 2009.
Short News
In a recent article published in the New York Times, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton discussed what she describes as a trifecta of gender issues: stability, security, and equity issues. The deep seated cultural resistance towards women's rights, particularly the lack of universal suffrage and literacy, is the final discriminatory bar to people's full participation in democratic government. However, political empowerment without economic empowerment has proven to be a non-starter across the globe. Micro-enterprise and maternal health among others will be core foreign policy issues for the Obama administration, which will be pursued together with more strategic partnerships with countries such as Pakistan and India. Source: NYTimes.
PGN Members Activities
- Pari Esfandiari, the editor of IranDokht, talks to Nadereh Chamlou, Senior Advisor to the Chief Economist of the Middle East and North Africa Region of the World Bank. They discussed the World Bank's policies for economic empowerment of women in the Middle East, the apparent success of women in education and why it has not translated into comparable increases in employment rates. View the interview.
- Djavad Salehi Isfahani is serving as Dubai Initiative Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government this year (2009). His most recent publications include: "Poverty, Inequality, and Populist Politics in Iran,"; "Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East"; "Looking Ahead: Making Markets and Institutions Work for Young People"; "Beyond Statism: Toward a New Social Contract for Iranian Youth"; and lastly, "Oil Wealth and Economic Growth in Iran".