WOW Festival: Making the world a better place for women

Festival organisers aspire to make the 2017 event an all-inclusive one

KARACHI: The Women of the World (WOW) Festival 2017 hopes to get bigger and better.

With the coming of 2017, this British festival, which first came to Karachi in May this year, aspires to motivate women of the world to rise and ask for their rights.



Chris Hunt, the director of British Council's Sindh and Balochistan chapters, said in his opening speech that he was new to Karachi. "I haven't been a part of the journey of WOW-Karachi that took place this year," he said. "However, I hope [that] through this festival, we are able to make this world a better place to live in. It's a platform for networking and you get to hear lots and lots of different stories. The plan is to reach out. Become more collaborative with the coming years and voice your concerns using the hashtag #WOWKarachi, which is [the] most critical thing to do."



Giving a clear video message, the founder of the WOW Festival, Jude Kelly, said that some of the advantages she got in her life, such as the rights to good education, work and vote, became possible because some people fought for it. "I believe WOW as a world festival has a lot to solve," she said. "It aspires to raise awareness about sexual harassment, rape and pay raise and all kinds of things. These are things that unite us. This is a festival for women, by women and for all women. The thinking has to take place and we need to make it happen. How voices are heard, everybody's story has to matter. It is all about telling the story."

According to Kelly, about 9,000 people visited the festival in 2016. "For 2017, I would like to see what you'd like to see and which music you [would] like to hear."



British Council South Asia arts director Jim Hollington said that they want to test how committed and sustained people are to this cause. "What issues need to be dealt with and how thinking can move ahead vis-a-vis a regional approach," he said.

While Karachi has become the first place of connectivity as far as WOW is concerned, the next ones will happen in Nepal, Sri Lanka and India, respectively.



Later, suggestions and recommendations were invited from participants who said that for the 2017 mega-event, discussions needed to be organised, literature by and for women needed to be heard, more women-based leadership activities needed to addressed in the upcoming session, success stories from lower strata of the society needed to be heard, while issues of transgender community, work ethics and pay gap required to be addressed.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 30^th, 2016.