CAPACITY BUILDING
WOMEN'S POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT
According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2020 by World Economic Forum (2021), Malaysia ranked no. 104 for the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), while scoring poorly of 0.677 for the overall score and only 10.8% or 0.108 on women political empowerment, where 1 is on par with men.
This reflects the reality of women’s secondary status in the family, community, and society at large. Women are the backbone of the family doing most of the reproductive work as well as contributing as much as men, in more and more cases, to the household economics but are still not seen as co-heads of households. Women’s disproportionate burden in the domestic sphere has prevented women from achieving their full economic potential and political empowerment. |
Since the birth of our nation 57 years ago,women’s needs and strategic concerns have never been at the core of national policies and planning, most gains have had to be pushed and demanded by women themselves. Our demands have not had much attention from those in the corridors of power who are mostly men. For example, our push for the Sexual Harassment Act is taking 20 years and still has yet to materialize.
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We are very convinced that women have to be the lawmakers in parliament and legislative assemblies if we want policies and legislation that are fair and supportive of our strive for equality.
Since 2019, SAWO has started to look for ways to work in increasing women’s participation in decision making and leadership roles in Sabah. Taking advantage of the snap state elections on 26th September 2020, we have started to make connections with women who are active in electoral politics. We are building more on this from 2021 onwards by bringing together a group of women leaders from political parties and those in CSOs and CBOs in order to strengthen collaboration on women’s rights issues as well as to increase women's participation in political processes and institutions at local and state levels. |
Our Activities
Gender & Political Empowerment Programme (GAP)
On the 5th of June 2021, the Gender & Political Empowerment (GAP) program was launched with 31 local women leaders from political parties, civil society organisations and local community groups joining the program.
First of it's kind, this initiative is aimed at increasing women's voices and representation in the political arena at all levels in the long run. But first, women leaders of all colors and stripes need to come together to empower ourselves and the GAP is just the platform to do this. |
Rakyat Is Bos Campaign
Rakyat Is Bos is an initiative by the SAWOrriors together with a few friends and advisors to encourage public involvement and engagement in issue-based discussions leading up to the 16th Sabah State Election. It also aimed to call for more women political involvement in the election and in the State Legislative Assembly (SLA). The main stake-holders that we sought to engage with are youths and women, as well as the leaders in the various political parties.
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Stop Kleptocracy Campaign
The SAWOrriors, endorsed by 41 other NGOs, CSOs and Community Leaders, have released a press statement on “All Kleptocrats Must be Put on Trial Without Political Interference” in which we raised our deep concerns on the recent democracy regress in the political arena to our former Prime Minister YAB Tan Sri Dato’ Haji Muhyiddin bin Haji Mohd. Yassin, Members of Parliament and State Legal Assembly, The judiciary, MACC and the Rakyat of Malaysia.
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SAWORRIORS PROGRAMME
The SAWOrriors Programme was a capacity building program to train young working women as gender advocates in Malaysia. This included online discussions, workshops and initiatives by the SAWO Team. This programme started in late 2017 and became a more concrete programme in 2018 as the need to build more gender advocates to take up leadership positions in SAWO became more urgent. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult this programme to be carried out.
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The SAWOrriors in 2019 to 2020
The SAWOrrior team consisted of seven young women professionals who came on board and were active in our regular discussion sessions aka “Pow Wows”, undertook various activities in various capacities to build their capacity and ended with a mentoring program. The mentoring program was a collaborative effort by SAWO with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and Ho Yock Lin and her associate, May Leong. Most of this batch are now members of SAWO EXCO and are continuing their learning through coordinating active working groups and other activities in SAWO.
We have learnt important and useful lessons in group formation and building, particularly group dynamics, decision making, and accountability. SAWO cultivates joint decision making in terms of planning and implementation which most of them found it challenging to get used in our line of work while adapting our values, mindset, and the way we work. |
SAWO certainly is a good platform to build leaders who want to grow with endless learning. - Amy Marcus, fellow SAWO member