Kashmir CMS Vatavaran 2006
Environment and Wildlife Traveling Film Festival
Partners
22-23 September 2006, Sher-e-Kashmir International Conference Centre, Kashmir
Actionaid International - India

Actionaid International is an international humanitarian and development organization working in 46 countries for poverty eradication and helping people in disaster situation. It is UK's third largest non-governmental agency, having its international secretariat in Johannesburg, South Africa. In Asia it is working in India, Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Cambodia and Vietnam, on a wide range of issues. It is working in India since 1972. Action Aid's work on poverty eradication has undergone a major change over the years. It has shifted its focus from service delivery for poverty eradication to changing the conditions that create poverty. So Action Aid has embarked on a rights-based approach on poverty eradication -an approach in which we seek to work with the dispossessed and poor to support and mobilize them to ask for their basic rights and question policies and practices that create inequalities and injustice.

Presently Actionaid is working with - dalit and tribal people, women, children, people living with chronic hunger, migrant and bonded workers, children out of education, urban poor people, trafficked persons, persons with disability, sex workers, persons living with HIV and AIDS, people affected by natural and human made disasters, informal sector labour, and other most marginalized sections of the rural and urban poor.

An increasingly globalised world obliges us, at ActionAid, to extend our work beyond national boundaries, to network with regional and international alliances that are seeking food rights and food security for all, gender justice, right to employment and livelihood, education for all, care and protection against HIV and AIDS, to name a few.

Our goal is to strengthen the community organization, social institutions and capacity of poor and marginalized people to enable formation of their alliances, which in turn would work to overcome the root causes of their poverty, marginalisation and exclusion.

The Values we cherish:

• Mutual respect, requiring us to recognise the innate worth of all people and the value of diversity
• Equity and justice, requiring us to work to ensure equal opportunity to everyone, irrespective of race, age, gender, sexual orientation, HIV status, colour, class, ethnicity, disability, location and religion
• Honesty and transparency: being accountable at all levels for the effectiveness of our actions and open in our judgements and communications with others
• Solidarity with the poor, powerless and excluded will be the only bias in our commitment to the fight against poverty & injustice.
• Courage of conviction, requiring us to be creative and radical, bold and innovative - without fear of failure - in pursuit of making the greatest possible impact on the causes of poverty
• Independence from any religious or party-political affiliation
• Humility in our presentation and behaviour, recognising that we are part of a wider alliance against poverty & injustice

• Poor and excluded people and communities will exercise power to secure their rights
• Women and girls will gain power to secure their rights
• Citizens and civil society across the world will fight for rights and justice
• States and their institutions will be accountable and democratic and will promote, protect and fulfil human rights for all