Karama at the Paris Peace Forum
Karama underlined the importance of the meaningful participation of women and civil society in peace processes at the Paris Peace Forum.
In a delegation led by founder and CEO Hibaaq Osman, Karama attended the fifth edition of the forum to present work with Mujeres por África that is supporting women’s groups in Sudan to develop and agree a national agenda as a solution for peace.
Speaking alongside participants including the presidents of France, Colombia, Argentina, and the leaders of the OECD, World Food Program, UNESCO, and many more organizations, Hibaaq Osman spoke about sustainable peace can only be achieved through a community-led, bottom up approach.
Speaking at the roundtable Peace by the people: involving civil society in conflict resolution, Hibaaq discussed the approach taken by Karama’s partners in Sudan to building a unified, national agenda for women in Sudan.
“Peace”, Hibaaq noted, “is not something that emanates from Geneva or New York. It has to be built within the community”. Hibaaq spoke of the Somali saying ‘peace and milk’ - “for peace to succeed and to last, people need to recognize they have a role to play and something invested in it. There can be no milk without peace, and without milk there will be no peace.”
Hibaaq also spoke in the roundtable on feminist foreign policy, noting that it is not a new concept but rather something that builds on the work of CEDAW, the Beijing Platform for Action, UNSCR 1325, and other milestones. Hibaaq warned that governments had undermined their own feminist foreign policies by competing priorities at other ministries - notably trade and defense. Supporting securitized solutions to international issues, picking favorities among armed factions, and selling arms have been foreign policy decisions that have disempowered women, deeply compromising feminist foreign policies espoused by international governments.
Following this lively discussion, the Global Partner Network for Feminist Foreign Policy, of which Karama is a member, was selected as one of the forum’s Scape-up Program awardees.
Find out more about the Paris Peace Forum here.
