Carmela Chung , Peru

“Fighting for women is a constant battle,” says Carmela Chung, political activist and CEDPA alumna. “You can’t say ‘Ah we’ve achieved that, relax everyone’ and sit down. You have to keep fighting because as they say: it’s two steps forward, one step back.”

Carmela has been fighting for a long time. She was born and raised in Iquitos, a town in the Peruvian Amazon, to a family that wasn’t typical for its time, she says. Carmela’s father was an accountant. Her mother wasn’t satisfied with being a homemaker, so she began to sew, eventually opening her own store.

Her parents believed strongly in education, so when Carmela graduated, she moved to Lima to attend university.

“I studied sociology. I was really invested in society’s problems. And, particularly, the conditions in which women live. I don’t concede that a woman has less value than a man,” said Carmela. “I’ve been concerned with women’s rights from the time I was a student…especially from the time I was at the university. You know, one enters the university and they change…you begin to really open your eyes to the situation.”

After graduating in 1982, Carmela began working for a project that provided an accelerated secondary school degree for rural workers. The program was for men, but Carmela and some of her colleagues went out into the villages in their spare time and began a pictographic newsletter for the rural women call Guarmi, which means women in the Quechua language. Soon after, they began educating the women on their rights.

Carmela continued fighting to advance women’s rights throughout her career, including working for Peru’s Ministry for Women. She also became a professor at the University of Cuzco teaching health, gender and population in the College of Public Health.

In 1990, Carmela became a member of Peru’s National Network for the Promotion of Women. The network is the only national organization of its kind in Peru. Carmela has served as both vice president and president. The network has promoted the civil and political rights of women, a campaign against violence and femicide, and the political participation of women.

“We have been working for women, women’s rights, for more than 20 years,” says Carmela. “We have promoted some laws that are critical to the feminist movement.”

In 1995, Carmela attended CEDPA’s Institution Building workshop, which included training on advocacy. She says she took those tools back to the network and began training her colleagues. Then in partnership with CEDPA, she began to enlarge the training to include other organizations.

“We were the first institution to train on advocacy,” said Carmela. “We’ve trained various NGOs on advocacy, and we are still applying what I learned in the workshop.”

Carmela can name several Peruvian women in political power today who graduated from her advocacy trainings.

“I get the most satisfaction from what I do when I meet someone I trained on the street and I can see they are still applying what I taught them,” she says. “You find them and they say ‘Teacher, I held this political office’ or ‘I work for this political party.’ In other words they are working for their communities. I get great satisfaction from that.”

Carmela continues fighting for the women of Peru as a program coordinator for UNIFEM on a project strengthens the capacity of women who own their own microenterprises.

Her program also is working in Cambodia, Egypt, Laos and Liberia, requiring Carmela to travel. She contacts CEDPA when she travels to see if any of CEDPA’s alumni are in those countries.

“CEDPA’s alumni network really helps,” says Carmela. “I think CEDPA is an institution that has helped the women’s movement around the world by focusing on training. Thirty-five years of training, that’s CEDPA’s strength.”