Chamsiah Djamal Tristian

Chamsiah, 34, is setting out to help Indonesia's women, especially the most marginalized, to visualize their situation, see practical opportunities (including concrete models she'll help develop and publicize sector by sector), and consequently break their own mental chains.

Chamsiah argues, against conventional thinking, that although there are problems, it is not Indonesia's laws that explain the terrible position of the country's 85 million women. She believes that their own awareness is key to their gaining equality and not being able to contribute more fully to development. She wants not just to raise women's awareness of what's wrong, but to demonstrate opportunities they can take in hand.
Chamsiah, who grew up in rural Aceh (the northern tip of Sumatera), has experience in journalism, research, and community development. Bringing all these skills to bear, she's launching a fresh, quite ambitious approach to define a centrally important part of the country's agenda:
(1) She's planning a series of 20 publications that will give women and the rest of society both the facts about women's current situation and a map to proven roads to a better future (illustrated with success stories). Most will focus in one specific area -- be it education or the facts and possibilities facing the tea-pickers.
(2) A good part of the substance of these volumes will come from her own concrete work with specific groups of women. SHe's now working with street vendors and others in the urban informal sector (Jakarta), women from coastal fishing communities (Riau), plantation tea-pickers (Sumatera), and villagers (Aceh). In each case, he work begins with research to define the women's situation; involves and helps make women from the communities thus defined become more aware; very carefully seeks out new economic opportunities that will provide a sustainably better economic foundation for the women in that sector; and then helps them develop, refine and spread both their awareness and these new options.
(3) Although her first focus is on the vast number of very poor women, Chamsiah is trying to multiply her impact by drawing in students and middle class women. Engaging them in such social action is itself an important step in developing their own awareness beyond "the narrowly consumerist coverage of the women's magazines." She also hopes to influence this press, e.g., by encouraging some of the middle class women she's engaging in her work to write for them.
(4) She plans to further leverage her work by offering training to government and NGO staff.

Women in Indonesia suffer many disadvantages. They often must eat after the men, leaving girls in poor families at a nutritional disadvantage. It's easier for men to strike out on their own, e.g., to migrate to the cities. There are legal inequalities, in Islamic as well as secular law.
However, most certainly the chief barriers facing women are intellectual and psychological. THey remain trapped in dependent, second class roles -- roles that undercut their ability to contribute to the country's and their families' development as much as to their won -- because they don't have a clear alternative vision.
Women suffer an enormous comparative educational disadvantage. Twice as many girls (60%) as boys don't complete primary school. (However, that 40 and 70 percent, respectively, now get primary education in an extraordinary achievement, especially compared to the utterly pathetic figures at independence or even of 20 years ago). Only 0.2 percent of all women have a university education.
When development programs are brought to local communities, the information and training flows chiefly to the men. Both traditional and most modern communications reinforce dependency. As a result, neither Indonesian women nor the rest of their society have this issue, let alone a better future, in view. Until it is, change will be slow and uncertain.

Chamsiah's strategy is to build this issue in the public's and, most especially, women's minds.
Her approach is one that has its roots in reality; both hard statistics and the hard test of causing actual change in the lives of those affected, sector by sector. It does more than criticize; it builds alternatives. And it seeks to engage at all levels -- from tea-picker to magazine editor.

Chamsiah was the daughters of the head of her village in central Aceh. Her grandfather was killed by the Dutch, and her grandmother aspired for her to become a mubaligh --the highest role allowed women in the Islamic faith. However, at 23 she was ultimately sent to Yogyakarta to study Islamic law, largely because her uncle argued that this training would open the way to practicing in the Islamic Courts, which handle, e.g., much of family law.
Less than totally engrossed by the law, she became active in the Islamic Student's Association (HMI). This involvement proved very important. SHe quickly learned leadership techniques far different from those of the unquestioned village head. HMI made her aware of women's issues, and she quickly became a women's leader in HMI.
However, economics induced her in 1976 to shift her non-school time to a paying job as a journalist. SHe did well, ultimately founding a successful women's page whose approach was a close forbearer of a number of her current ideas: It encouraged women to become independent, relying heavily on practical ideas and success stories.
After graduating in 1978, Chamsiah worked as a researcher for government and non-government institutions and, increasingly, as a community developer and trainer for those seeking to build cooperatives. Before leaving recently to work fulltime on her own new organization, The Center for Women's Resource Development (PPSW), Chamsiah's base was with Indonesia's leading population organization. She left her mark there by conceiving and selling the idea that the organization should engage in concrete grassroots experiments as well as in its traditional policy consulting and resource dissemination.
Chamsiah has mastered all the major skills the implementation of her idea requires. Over the next several years she should be able to help many more Indonesian women become active sources of change.