Listening to the women of the mountains

The United Nations designated December 11 as International Mountain Day in 2003.  Earlier, in 2002, the UN General Assembly declared 2002 as International Year of Mountains.
The International Mountain Day has its roots in Chapter 13 of Agenda 21: 'Managing Fragile Ecosystems--Sustainable Mountain Development' which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1992.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is the coordinating agency in the preparation and celebration of International Mountain Day.
This year's theme for International Mountain Day is: 'Mountains - Key to a Sustainable Future'.
International Mountain Day is an opportunity to create awareness about the importance of mountains in our lives and to highlight the opportunities and constraints in mountain development. Mountains provide most of the world's freshwater, harbour a rich variety of plants and animals, and are homes to lots of people. But unfortunately, environmental degradation, the consequences of climate change, exploitative mining, armed conflict, poverty and hunger threaten the extraordinary web of life that the mountains support.
Many challenges are unique to the mountain communities. Above all, women are the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in mountain areas due to many reasons including gender-based violence.  These women are rarely acknowledged as agents of change with responsibilities, knowledge and skills.  Mountain women are excluded from political participation and decision-making. Women's lack of market information and bargaining power allows the traders to exploit the producers. These hard-working women and girls of mountains contribute much, but in return they get less/ little due to gender inequality and deprivation of their human rights.
ICIMOD (International Center for Integrated Mountain Development), a regional inter-governmental learning and knowledge-sharing centre, based in Kathmandu, Nepal, serves eight regional member-countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH). The countries are:
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and  Pakistan. ICIMOD recently organised an international conference titled 'Addressing Poverty and Vulnerability in the Hindu Kush Himalayas: Forging Regional Partnerships to Enable Transformative Change'.  It was held in Kathmandu, Nepal, from December 01 to 04, 2013. This writer had the opportunity to attend the conference.
The speakers at the conference of ICIMOD highlighted many areas which needed to be addressed urgently for sustainable mountain development. They especially recommended a strong platform for the 'women of mountain areas'. The parallel session titled 'Inclusive Social Development: The Challenges for Including the Excluded -- Gender Dimensions' discussed approaches, practical ideas, and methodologies to make mountain development truly inclusive.
The vulnerability in mountain areas is particularly high, where poverty intersects with discrimination, be it because of gender, caste, or ethnicity. The very burning issues --- how gender can be considered, and accounted for in times of rapid change, in terms of physical changes including climate change, urbanisation, infrastructure and land use changes, the changing aspirations and identities of mountain people, women in particular --- figured prominently in the discussion.  
Dr. Margaret Catley-Carlson, member of ICIMOD Board of Governors and Programme Advisory Committee, chaired the panel.
The panel has agreed that there is a 'disconnect' in the knowledge of mountain issues between people living in the plains and those in the mountains. To bridge the gap, the speakers suggested bringing women together in collective bodies, so that all the women and girls of mountains get a platform to voice their own issues boldly. And it is also imperative that women of the mountains must be heard.
The panel has agreed that in order to accelerate progress, women must be given a collective voice and listening mechanisms within the policy-making process. It suggested that data, particularly demographic data, must be made available to guide suitable strategies for diverse sets of women including young women, women in reproductive age, women farmers, employed women, women with disabilities, and others. The panel has pointed out that appropriate attention must be paid to gender-responsive budgeting to support implementation of plans, projects and reach the national and international goals.
Sharmind Neelormi, Associate Professor of Jahangirnagar University and adviser of the Centre for Global Change-Bangladesh, Ms Sharmind was present at the ICIMOD conference as one of the discussants. She very rightly said that the issues regarding mountain women vary depending on different geo-physical and ethno-political realities across the Hindu Kush Himalayan region. In Bangladesh, there is hardly any documentation on this issue. "Being a part of the majority community living in the plain land, we have a very simplistic view on the mountain women," Sharmind said. She added that besides the issues of displacement, armed conflicts, there are issues such as water insecurity, lack of access to markets where they can sell their agricultural products, customary practices of property ownership etc.
The exposure to the so-called modernisation is one of the factors that change the indigenous practices. The gap in knowledge which separates the plain land people from those in the mountains is a great concern. "We need to know how mountain women define and view their 'empowerment', and how they want to address those issues. Our national policies, which predominantly portray the issues of plain land, must address and include the mountain people-related concerns," Ms Sharmind observed.  
The governments, the civil society and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), donor agencies, development partners and the print and electronic media should urgently consider and address the importance of  ending gender inequality, food insecurity and malnutrition, violence against women, discrimination and deprivation that women and girls of mountains have long been passing through.  
Keeping the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in view, the leaders of the Hindu Kush Himalayan region should consider producing  comprehensive mountain development strategies or 'Look Mountains' policy for inclusive, sustainable mountain development as post-MDGs, so that every person of the mountains is counted and included equally. Forging local, national, regional and international partnerships to enable transformative changes is also a must. Policy makers must be more realistic instead of being charged with occasional surges of emotion over the deprived people.
The writer is a media person and human rights activist. [email protected]