World Social Forum 2007: Another World is Possible for Africa
Release Date: 19 January 2007
By Kumi Naidoo, CIVICUS Secretary-General
The World Social Forum (WSF) provides a unique space for civil society actors from all over the world to meet, exchange, discuss, network and learn from each other. The WSF 2007 will take place at Kasarani (Moi International Sports Stadium) in Nairobi, Kenya on 20 - 25 January. The opening ceremony will start with a Peace March, from Kibera, possibly the largest Africas slum, to the central Uhuru Park. More than 80, 000 participants are expected and 1,290 workshops, roundtables and events are registered.
Themes for the seventh WSF have been pegged to the motto, 'People's struggles, people's alternatives - Another world is Possible'. Topics to be addressed include HIV/AIDS, gender, privatisation, landlessness, peace and conflict, migration and diaspora, youth issues, debt relief, free trade agreements, labour and housing.
"The World Social Forum is a manifestation of the spirit of the people who have refused to die, people who have refused to be excluded [from participating in the global economy]," said Wahu Kahara, a Kenyan activist and one of the organisers. The Forum is also intended to counter the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where leaders from predominantly business and politics, with a few from academia, and a few from civil society discuss global issues.
Several of CIVICUS members and partners are proposing activities such as:
A collective of organisations around the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) will launch the decent work/decent life campaign, on 21 January.
Social Watch proposes a workshop on Human Rights and Poverty: the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights perspective on 22 January 2007. This workshop is aiming at exploring in a participatory way poverty as a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon and its relationship with the economic social and cultural rights. It will debate poverty from a human rights perspective and their justiciability beyond the political will of the governments.
Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) will co-convene with Jubilee South AMPDD and South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE) a workshop on Debt and Poverty, on 21 January and will host an Open Debate on GCAP policy demands and 2007 mobilisation, on 22 January.
The United Nations Millennium Campaign will organise a Global Public Forum on the MDGs, on 22 January.
CIDSE (an alliance of 15 Catholic development organisations from Europe and North America) agencies will organise a panel debate focused on the Impacts of oil, mining and logging on Development on 23 January where a joint appeal, agreed by leading civil society organisations, will be presented. The debate will be launched with a wider audience led by a panel of representatives from 5 leading civil society organisations from Africa, Latin America and Asia in order to demonstrate the worldwide concerns related to extractive industries.
The future movements of the World Social Forum. After 7 years of World Social Forums all around the world, we find ourselves increasingly in a moment of self-reflection, around different questions. How can the Forum be made politically more useful? In how far is the Forum a process tying together the experiences in local and regional processes and how should we relate to other initiatives and spaces, as for example the autonomous spaces around the Forum? To what extent is the World Social Forum reproducing exclusions and practices of the neocolonial capitalist order, and how can these be overcome?
