Gender Equality

Catalan Women with a Muslim Tradition Speak: Opportunities and Challenges

23 March 2015. From 18:30 | Workshop | Catalan | IEMed, Barcelona

The citizen and political participation of women, their economic and professional autonomy and the eradication of gender-based violence are three fully valid demands that concern us all. To assess how these struggles are experienced by Catalan women of Muslim tradition, three leaders of associations, with a long history of support for these groups, take the floor at an event open to dialogue in the Auditorium of the IEMed.

The first to speak is Fatima Ahmed, president of the intercultural association Dialogues for Women, who talks about the different participation mechanisms they promote from their organization. Faced with the obstacles of integration, her proposal is to create meeting spaces in the neighborhood and get involved in all possible activities with a double goal: empowerment and visibility.

Huma Jamshed, president of the Pakistani women’s association ACESOP, focuses her intervention on claiming economic autonomy as an indispensable requirement for integration. She also explains that Pakistani husbands often turn to ACESOP to help their wives integrate.Afterwards, Salwa El Gharbi, president of the Association for Training, Applied Consulting and Research (AFCAR), talks about gender-based violence, which she wants to unleash at all times from migration processes. In this sense, she states that violence against women is a national problem, affecting both native and migrant women.