Thank you. You'll be hearing from me in a minute, so I'm not going to take up too much of your time.
My organization, the International Civil Society Action Network, works with an alliance of independent and locally grounded and founded women-led organizations across many conflict zones. What we're finding is that they often are the answer. If we engage them and they're included in the processes that we're talking about, they have the most culturally relevant and sensitive approaches to engage on these issues.
I'll give you an example. We have a colleague in Sri Lanka who founded an association of parents of missing servicemen. Her own son went missing in the war in Sri Lanka in 1998. She led a group of mothers into the jungle. They were the first ones to make contact with the LTTE—the Tamil Tigers back then—and much of the engagement that she then had subsequently led to the peace talks that ultimately failed when the government got involved.
The access she had to that region has served her well, because people in that area know her and they trust her, and now, as the reconciliation process is going on, she's able to reach out to communities and work with them. She's been working with the police up in the north and northeast of Sri Lanka.
One of the things she's done is that she's adapted the Resolution 1325 agenda, the women, peace and security agenda. She has taken the materials that we've developed internationally and used them in a local context to work with the police and to inform them about what this broad agenda is. She has asked them what they thought the issues were that they were dealing with. The police identified gender-based violence in the communities as one of their key concerns, and they came up with their own ideas of how to engage communities around issues.
As a result of this entry point, the trust between them and local communities has also gone up. By virtue of being a local actor herself whose son was in the army, she also had access to the defence ministry, so she was also able to lobby the defence ministry to send Tamil-speaking women to serve in these police stations and in the military units up there so they could communicate directly with local populations, because the army was mainly Sinhalese-speaking.
This was nothing imposed externally. It was a local actor who took the norms that we had, adapted them to her region and to her context, and has now had an incredible multiplier effect in terms of making it indigenous and responsive to the needs on the ground.
In the Middle East-North Africa region, we are finding that one of the things we'd like to do—and we would welcome Canada's involvement and support—is that it's really important to pull together the different ways in which women's organizations around the Middle East have dealt with the issue of sexual violence in their communities. These are huge taboo subjects, but in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, etc., there have been all sorts of different innovations.
What we want to do is bring that diversity of approaches to the Iraqi context so that our Iraqi colleagues can see and learn from that, and then, with seed funding, enable them to carry on that work. It doesn't have to be expensive. It is culturally relevant, as they're learning from each other. That peer-to-peer exchange is absolutely critical, but we, as international actors, have the access to and the knowledge of what's going on, so our role really has to be to facilitate and enable our local partners to have that information and enable them to have the best practices and adapt them to their own context.