I'll say a few things about we are doing currently to prepare the women to have an effective role in the Loya Jirga and then I will take questions.

Why are we doing this particularly for the women? Well, we expect about 200 women to come to the Loya Jirga. We believe, and they believe, this is a golden opportunity for them to actually play the role they have been dying to play, trying to play, as well and we, all the groups within the women's ministry, as well as all of us who have the gender issue at heart in Afghanistan, will look at this orientation as an opportunity to fulfill three objectives.

The first objective, which would be a short-term one, which is effectively imparting some skills during the orientation to help them build coalition and really influence political decisions within the Loya Jirga, in terms of the process in terms of maybe the structure of the government the form of the government, whatever they feel is a common objective as women in Afghanistan.

The second objective, which would be post Loya Jirga, which would be in our view a good opportunity to a) gather, maybe about 40-45 women among those 200 delegates who have the skills, the leadership skills the communication skills so that we can create a network, perhaps organize a press debriefing just after the Loya Jirga and for us an international community to look beyond that, have a network which will be across the country all over the provinces that we can bring back for a workshop for programme planning and do some resource mobilization with them. So these are the three objectives.

As far as the short term objective is concerned, what we are hoping to do is the following, we are the moment fighting to have a full day but we were told it would be approximately 7 or 8 eight hours, starting at 7, the day might be the 8th or 9th, we are still working on that to have a reply by today and the day will be organised as follows:

Maybe the first hour and a half would be to open the session, to have two leading presentations from Dr. Sema Samar [Minister of Women's Affairs] on her experience as a political figure within the cabinet as a minister as well. That would perhaps give some indication perhaps to the women, about the challenges that Seema Samar is facing or has been facing, or might be facing if she remains as a minister. We will also have a short presentation by professor Mahbobah [ Vice-Chair of the Special Independent Commission to Convene the Emergency Loya Jirga], that would look at the history or give a historical point of view on the Loya Jirga in the history of Afghanistan and perhaps for [inaudible] and what the role of the women has been has been during the Loya Jirga in the past and to what extent this could influence this current process. Then we will break into 10 groups, so if we have 200 women, there will be 10 groups of 10 women each, where we will have two facilities per group and is basically working with them to teach them some skills on how, when there is a common interest they don't' go for a private or a personal interest. To build coalitions so that their force will have an impact during the Loya Jirga and also for us to be able to identify some of the women who have the skills to [inaudible] and be able to work with them. So broadly, this is how the induction is going to be organised, we still have problems getting all the facilitators for that, it will be done Afghans for Afghan women, so there will be nobody from our office working on that, but are behind the facilitation process.

Questions & Answers

Q: I had heard the teaching orientation going to involve teaching the women the parliamentary rules of order, and there was a hope this could be imparted to the male delegates at the Loya Jirga?
Special Advisor: I am very happy you ask the question, I have been pushing and I really use the word pushing purposely, but it doesn't always work. What I would have liked, what we would have liked, at least the group which is behind the preparation is have a half day that-we were planning for two days really, so the first day would have gone like today, but the second day, what I was hoping is that we would have male delegates and have them work together, so that women really feel comfortable about actually practising some of the newly acquired skills and for men, to be acquainted with the kind of styles that women would have during the Loya Jirga. And finally for women to see whether they can build coalitions with some of the men. We haven't' been able to achieve that unfortunately.

Q: Why not?
Special Advisor: A lot of restrictions, limitations, conservative attitudes, logistical issues and that's why I feel the second step, which is beyond the Loya Jirga is going to be extremely important, because then we can actually bring a group of women and men together and look at what was the experience in the Loya Jirga, for them as women, for them as men, but also for men looking at these women functioning in the Loya Jirga, how best can we really create a network with men part of it. I think your guess will be as good as mine- over the next few days, we will see how best we can achieve that, but that would be the ultimate objective.

Q: Do you expect the women of the Loya Jirga to be segregated at the back of the room as they have tended to be during this whole election process or do you think they will be mixing more?
Special Advisor: I have no real answer at this stage about that, we still haven't been able to go there and look at how everything is going to be organised, this will be sorted out between today and tomorrow afternoon, so hopefully the next briefing we will let you know.

Q: Will there be any possibility to attend these training sessions as embers of press, and talk to women about their questions about the Loy Jirga before and after?
Special Advisor: We are working on that, we believe that might be a possibility, I think again it is one of the issues we started on early this morning and we are talking to the commission, I will be seeing Mahboobah later on today and we will let you know. There are also representatives to [inaudible] bi-lateral donors, in particular the European Union, we had a long meeting yesterday, who would also want to attend, because once again, we would like to be able to pursue so that we have some programme donor funds, so maybe towards the end of the day or tomorrow morning we will have the plans. But I think the women would be very interested in talking and we feel, we had hoped that today we would have had some of them, but ti's not possible, but next time it will be there voices, not ours.
Spokesman: If I may add something to this, we have been working on this already since yesterday, there are difficulties, particularly if it is on the 9th, and not the 8th. One thing that we did not discuss yet, neither with Fatiha nor with the Commission, maybe is if we can do, once you are done, outside the site itself, it might be easier to have it at the press centre, but I'm not committing myself to that, we are just looking to different alternatives.

Q: Two questions, who are the facilitators? And any role you have played, or anyone else has played in establishing any aspect of [inaudible] agenda within the overall women's agenda of rules and procedures [inaudible]?
Special Advisor: First question might be easy, second I'm not very sure about that; I've been here only three weeks so far. The facilitators are a collection of women, some of them from the Ministry of Women's' Affairs, who works with her, some of them are colleagues from other agencies who work directly with Dr. Seema Samar and I think there is UNIFEM, UNICEF, there is UNDP, myself in the back seat because I don't' speak Farsi. Four women, as I said, from the women's Ministry and there will be a few women, Afghan women, who are currently involved in a lot of the networks in Peshawar who will be arriving today. We've had difficulty finding a) the right number of people and b) more importantly, the right people with the right skills, but we will have to work on that basis so we spend close to two hours this morning, just working very, very systematically on each and every step, guidelines for the facilitators. Yesterday we had a long meeting because the issue is not only to be able to go through an agenda but basically to direct the discussion towards achieving some results, so the procedure we will be using, is to have somebody at the scene to do the facilitator, want to be at the back to pick on very important issues to pursue, and I think that will be important. Another thing that will be important, another thing that will happen in the group which I forgot to say is that the participants will be introducing themselves in the group because it will be easier to manage but we will be asking them to write down what is their main expectation, for them as women coming from village X out of this Loya Jirga, with the purpose that we will actually gather those analyse them and see what are the issues we need to look at beyond the Loya Jirga.

Q: It's difficult because I don't really know what it would mean, but there has been no real capacity for women in any organised fashion [inaudible] rules of procedure of the Loya Jirga.
Special Advisor: Not entirely, because we are not organising this now two days before, there has been a process that has been going on before. There has been a process that has been going on for quite some tie, both at the level of Kabul but in close collaboration with all our colleagues in the region who themselves have been involved in the assembly to select the women and all the delegates, so there is already a process of work and let us not forget, there was a process before the Loya Jirga that existed for the past six years in this country if not more, so there are women who have been organised in various activities in an organised manner. I used to work for WFP and they used to be a lot of things with WFP in this country. But actually being able to influence the rules of procedure at this stage is a little bit difficult because we don't even have them.