In a globalized world, women have already started to globalize their resistance and solidarity. Since the 8th of March, women from more than 5000 groups and 155 countries have started to walk against poverty and all forms of violence against women. Such a huge participation shows the determination of women to get rid of these unbearable and intolerable social, economic and political scourges. All over the world women have made imagination into power and have organized thousands of actions, activities, and mobilizations to question the actual disorder of the world, to confront political leaders with their responsibilities towards women, and to propose alternatives. And it's only a beginning!

  Women have a specific interest in the globalization process. Some claim that women stand to gain the most from globalization ˜ that, for example, they will have access to more jobs and more flexible types of work. But the fact is that it is women and children first who become poorer and suffer the most dramatic consequences of globalization. The effects of globalization are not the same for the two sexes. In the global expansion of the world market, they are assigned specific roles. For example:

• 70% of the poorest people in the world are women and children;
  
  
• women and girls provide 70% of the hours worked but receive only 10% of the revenues, and own only 1% of the world‚s wealth;
  
  
• for equal work worldwide, women continue to earn only 60% of the wages of men;
  
  
• in developing countries hit hard by structural adjustment policies, 2/3 of the children who do not go to school are girls, and 2/3 of the world‚s non-literates are women;
  
  
• "growth" is largely the result of the invisible, unrecognized, and unpaid work of women;
  
  
• traffic of women from poor countries to rich countries has grown and prostitution is part of the "development" strategy used in some countries to obtain hard currency.

  The World March of Women is not a "feminine parade" but a political action that aims at combating the structural causes of both poverty and violence against women. For us, the actual situation of women is due to the combination of two global forces: neo-liberal capitalism and patriarchy. These two systems feed each other and reinforce each other in order to maintain the vast majority of women in a situation of cultural inferiority, social devaluation, economic marginalization, "invisibility" of their existence and labor and the marketing and commercialization of their bodies. All these situations closely resemble apartheid. That is why we closely link struggles against poverty and struggles against violence: it‚s not a matter of one or the other, or one after the other, but both at the same time. That is why the March aims at breaking away once and for all both from neo-liberal capitalism and from patriarchy. It is our specific contribution to the worldwide anti-neo-liberal globalization movement.

  Among the structural causes of this situation, the March clearly identifies the role of international institutions like the WTO and the World Bank and IMF in the impoverishment of peoples, and of women and children in particular. The imposition of structural adjustment programs following the spiral of debt is one of the main causes of the actual situation. That is why the March wants structural changes rather than structural adjustments. We are marching for 17 demands, several of which are already part of the global social movement agenda:

• the rejection of any project resembling the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)
  
  
• the end of structural adjustment programs and of cutbacks in social budgets and public services
  
  
• the cancellation of the debt of all Third World countries, taking into account the principles of responsibility, transparency of information, and accountability.

  We call women and men to take part in the future actions of the March:

• On October 15 in Washington, the U.S. women‚s movement will demonstrate for their national demands and with representatives of all participating countries to protest against World Bank/IMF policies, as well as for the March‚s demands;
  
  
• On October 17 in New York, a demonstration will support the international delegation of the March as it meets with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to inform him of the women‚s demands and of our determination to see them implemented.