CIDA Photo: Roger LeMoyne

-- Women at the Peace Table, UNIFEM, 2000

Women should be central to any peace process. They hold their families together during and after a war. They also build and maintain peace at the community level. It is important to support and recognize these skills and efforts.

Many different strategies are needed to ensure that women are able to participate in the peace building process. It is very important to understand the impact of conflict on women and girls. When this is understood, people can design a peace process that provides the protection women and girls need and helps their healing and recovery. For this reason, all surveys and reports on human rights should include information about the impact on women and children.

During the peace process, a country's constitution is the most important tool to guarantee human rights, including equal rights for both men and women. It can ensure women's right to vote, to work in elections and to run for public office. When women become part of a political party, they can make sure that their voices are heard and their issues are brought to the public's attention. It is also very important to ensure that women have equal rights to own property and to inherit money and land. Unequal land rights make women dependent on men, force them to live in poverty and can become a cause of new conflicts.

• During the Burundi peace process, women delegates helped set out a complete agenda that reflected women's needs and priorities.
• During the 1990s, grass-roots women's struggles in Sierra Leone, Burundi and El Salvador helped focus international attention on women's role in the peace process. These struggles lead to the United Nations Security Council recognizing that peace is strongly connected with equality between women and men.

1. Experts should study both the effect of armed conflict on women and women's role in the peace-building process.
2. Governments, the international community and individual societies should provide support for women's role in the peace process.
3. All research and reports on human rights aspects of conflicts should include information about the impact on women and children. This information should be used in planning peace support operations.

Refugee = a person who is forced to flee to another country.
Internally Displaced Person (IDP) = a person who is forced to flee within their own country.