Women at Work Seminar 2024

Our second regional seminar as part of our Women at Work programme took place in November 2024 in Negombo, Sri Lanka. Find the impressions and highlights from the seminar in this article.

For our second Women at Work seminar, the NHRF gathered partners and important actors from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and India for 3 days between 4 and 7 November in Negombo, Sri Lanka. We also had representatives from Fagforbundet, (Norway’s largest trade union), and from the Norwegian Embassies in New Delhi and Islamabad joining the seminar.

The goal of the event was to facilitate and engage in conversations and experience-sharing, learning from each other and getting inspired to continue working to support women workers, LGBTIQ+ workers and other marginalised groups in their workplaces and beyond.

Building on our first Women at Work conference in 2022, the event allowed the participants to re-establish connections they made back then and to create new ones.

About the Women at Work programme: The NHRF has supported marginalised workers and their fight for their rights for more than three decades. In 2019, the NHRF began developing a targeted Women at Work (WaW) programme in the South Asia region. Under this program, the NHRF has been supporting several organisations, with the majority being women-led, who support communities that experience discrimination at their workplaces in different informal and formal sectors.

We arranged roundtables, group discussions and presentations around the themes of organising informal and formal workers’ labour movements, gender-based violence in the workplace, as well as climate change, just transitions and its impact on the working class. While also exploring synergies in work, regional trends in fair labour practices and challenges to civil society engagement.

The seminar also included an important space to address the topic of psychosocial support and well-being of those who work in the field. This was very appreciated by the seminar participants.

We are grateful for the participation and support of the Norwegian Embassies in New Delhi and Islamabad, as well as Fagforbundet. They were part of an interesting roundtable discussion and touched on different ways, in which international actors can support local movements in South Asia in their efforts against discrimination at the workplace.

One highlight for many participants was a conversation with workers from a Free Trade Zone in Sri Lanka organised by our grantee partner, Stand Up Movement Lanka. Through the conversation, we were able to understand the context of the struggles towards ending discrimination at the workplace in Sri Lanka from the workers themselves.

We also had time to enjoy the beautiful surroundings of Negombo, go on morning walks to watch the local fishermen and relax together.

We are very grateful to all participants for making the Women at Work Seminar 2024 a truly special experience and a meaningful space for important conversations around the workers’ rights of women, LGBTIQ+ people and marginalised groups in the region.

We hope that the connections made and learnings taken from the seminar can contribute to the important and extraordinary work of these actors towards more equal, just and safe workplaces and societies.

Photos by: NHRF/ Iresha M Yapa

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