ASEC/RIPESS Asia report on its workshop on « Transformative Economic Movements at the ASEAN Grassroots: Hope and Inclusion »

Benjamin, JR Quinones, November 2018

The ASEC Team hosted a workshop on day 2 on the theme Transformative Economic Movements at the ASEAN Grassroots: Hope & Inclusion. About thirty people participated at this WS1 held on Nov 3, 2018 from 11am to 1pm at ACSC/APF 2018 in Singapore. Here we made five presentations.

Denison presented an overview of SDGs, SSE & ASEAN community vision followed by the presentation of four case studies which are country specific. Onn Sein presented a micro case study from Malaysia of how a group of nomadic forest based indigenous community who were hunter & gathers are now organic vegetable farmers. Boobsoom highlight the story of the informal sector namely street vendors in Bangkok who were in solidarity for their business development but at the same time exercised their citizenship human rights in hosting a street demonstration to fights and advocacy their rights to undertake business activities without corruption and harassment of local city enforcement officials. Eri of Indonesia drew on the work of Bina Swadaya’s village revitalisation program to address rural-urban migrations well as migration to other countries as low skilled workers. Ben highlights the exploitation of poor peasants in Isabela province in Philippines highlighting their application to SDGs and SSE in their grassroots action.

We concluded the workshop noting the challenges and solutions needed. ASEC has recommendation that ASEAN CSO/NGOs undertake a mapping exercise of our activities with SDGs – goals, targets and indicators. We also have called for the write up of grassroots realties not just the description of human rights violations but the local solutions undertaken by the grassroots committees in addressing their economic, social & cultural rights as well as their civil & political rights.

Downloads: asec_ripess_asia_report_-_feedback_from_ws1_transformative_economics_workshop_asec_.pdf (110 KiB)