Selected Project for the first Paris Peace Forum
11 to 13 Novmeber 2018, Paris
This article is written by Elsa D'Silva and Eirliani Abdul Rahman who represented the Global Diplomacy Lab at the first-ever edition of the Paris Peace Forum from 11 to 13 November 2018.
The Paris Peace Forum is an annual event that is intended to promote governance solutions in five key areas: peace and security, the environment, new technologies, development and inclusive economy. It was created at the initiative of French President Emmanuel Macron to provide a platform for government officials, international organisations and representatives of civil society from around the world. Its open, bottom up format aims to enable these actors to launch collaborative initiatives and track two exercises, as well as mediation efforts and bilateral dialogues.
Being one of 120 selected projects in the Space of Soulutions, we had the opportunity to meet various project leaders and organisations over the three day period. Apart from one on one conversations, we held a pitch on the second day as well as a longer, more in-depth “meet up” on the last day of the event. Our one hour long session used the issue of “Women-friendly Cities” to apply a creative tension format. Asking the participants from various professional backgrounds, countries and different genders a series of ten difficult questions, we encouraged them to take a stand on the issue as well as share their personal experiences. The questions we asked included the following: “Is your city friendly to women and girls?”, “Do you feel safe using public transport late at night in your city?” and “Is the mobile phone a tool for security?”.
All the women present confirmed that they had experienced some form of sexual harassment in public spaces. The men who participated listened respectfully and took in the varying view points as well as sharing their own stories. This storytelling helped to ascertain the fact that sexual violence is a common issue. At the end, there was agreement that there is a need to create spaces for such discussions and dialogues in order to create greater understanding.
This is true not only of the session’s topic, but also of the Paris Peace Forum itself, which plays an important role in promoting peace and intercultural understanding on a variety of issues by creating such a space. Both of us felt strongly encouraged by the openness displayed by the participants, each trying to develop solutions to intractable problems: “Finding common ground at a people to people level has never been more important than at the present when nationalism is on the rise in various countries and multilateral institutions appear to be at risk.”
Further Events
Elsa Marie D’Silva is the founder and CEO of Red Dot Foundation (Safecity), a platform that crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public spaces. Since Safecity started in December 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India, Kenya, Cameroon and Nepal.
Elsa Marie is an alumna of the US State Department’s Fortune Program, a fellow with Rotary Peace, Aspen New Voices and Vital Voices, and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. She is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women. Moreover, she has won the Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award launched by Dušan Stojanović (European Angel Investor of the Year 2013) and the SheThePeople’s Digital Woman Award in Social Impact.
Prior to Safecity, she spent 20 years in the aviation industry, where she worked with Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines. In her last role in aviation, she was Vice President Network Planning.
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Read more about Elsa's work at Safecity and see for yourself in this documentary. She also has a very clear vision for the Global Diplomacy Lab.
Eirliani Abdul Rahman is co-founder of YAKIN (Youth, Adult Survivors & Kin In Need), an NGO working in the field of child rights and child protection issues, and a member of Twitter’s Safety & Trust Council.
In September 2015, the #FullStop to #childsexualabuse campaign that Eirliani led on behalf of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi reached 16 million people over six weeks. She won the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Award the same year.
Eirliani edited Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi’s book Will for Children, a collection of essays on child labour published in 2016. Her book on true accounts by survivors of child sexual abuse Survivors: Breaking the Silence on Child Sexual Abuse was published by Marshall Cavendish in 2017. It won joint second prize in the 2020 Golden Door Awards.
She also contributed a case study to the medical textbook Essentials of Global Health, co-edited by Babulal Sethia, Past President and Global Health Lead of the Royal Society of Medicine, which was published by Elsevier in London in 2018. The book won first prize in the Public Health category at the 2019 British Medical Association book awards.
Eirliani was in the Singapore Foreign Service from 2005 to 2015, serving in Berlin as First Secretary (Political) and then in Delhi as Political Counsellor. From June 2015 to November 2017, she was a member of the Advisory Council of the Global Diplomacy Lab. She is a Fellow of the London-based Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.
Eirliani lives in Singapore. She speaks Malay, English, German and Russian.
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Read more about Eirliani in her latest blog article. You can also read her articles about her polar expedition and about human trafficking and learn more about her work, activism and contribution to the Gender Alliance.
