Magda Mateus Cardenas Director of Centro Amauta, Cusco, Peru

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Magda Mateus Cardenas, trained as an anthropologist, is currently director of Centro Amauta, a feminist organization in Peru that addresses issues of gender, class, and culture. In this interview, Mateus Cardenas describes her long involvement with development organizations and grass-roots campaigns to improve women's status. She notes that, although many organizations have adopted a gender perspective, few comprehend its highly political, transformational aspects. Women's rights tend to be viewed by development agencies as just one more factor to be incorporated into development projects rather than as a perspective that changes views of development itself. A genuine gender perspective entails changes in the organizational, social, and political aspects of the themes of autonomy and empowerment, with adaptations of content and methods to local conditions. A precondition to women's emancipation is access to and control of financial and economic resources. This, in turn, requires training in technical skills and access to the marketplace on more competitive terms.