This is a brief backgrounder on ROSARIO GONZALEZ MANALO, a multifaceted, outstanding Filipina, focusing on her as an ADVOCATE OF WOMEN’S CAUSES and ROLE MODEL FOR WOMEN throughout her career as national and international civil servant. Ms. Manalo is the official Philippine candidate for director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Perhaps the toughest test of her intellectual mettle and personal skills as a women’s leader came in Nairobi, Kenya, in the landmark global conference marking the end of the International Women’s Decade in 1985. Before that, in 1984, she was elected president of the United nations Commission on the Status of Women, a term lasting from 1984 to 1986. In recognition of such mettle and personal qualities, she was reelected unanimously by representatives from 32 countries as chairman of the same UN commission, this time acting as a preparatory body for the 1985 World Conference in Kenya.

She called the Nairobi Conference as "an end to the UN Decade on Women and a beginning of new hopes and dreams, and of heightened expectations from women all over the world."

The TIME magazine’s account (August 5, 1985) of Nairobi tells of how 160 country delegations, despite two weeks of bitter debates, had managed - through compromises and some of the best diplomatic maneuverings ever - to adopt a document of "forward-looking strategies" for women that "avoided ideological extremes."

"The UN won in spite of itself," Manalo was quoted by TIME as saying, "and it took women to do it."

It was, indeed, a triumph of reason, and of the determination by the delegates not to let their conference collapse, for the sake of the women all over the world who needed the commitments laid down in the UN document to change their lives. Thus, the politically charged atmosphere notwithstanding, and the bitter recriminations between and among the countries they represented, the women made sure the "spirit of Nairobi" would triumph.

Among the contentious political issues that hounded the conference: South Africa’s apartheid policy, which most every delegation hammered; the five-year war between Iraq and Iran; the complaint by Muslim, Third World and Eastern Bloc nations against the "Zionist terrorists;" and the Soviet-aligned countries’ rebuke of the US for its support for Israel. Unknown to many in Nairobi then, Ms. Manalo was also struggling through one of the most difficult personal dilemmas in her life. The day after she had flown to Nairobi to complete her role as chairman of the preparatory commission, her mother, Pilar Rodriguez Gonzalez died in Belgium. She had been exceptionally close to her mother, and Ms. Manalo initially decided she would fly to Belgium, but was prevailed on by colleagues to finish her job. Her husband Armando, then Philippine ambassador to Switzerland, and their daughter Rosario, took care of the arrangements for her mother instead.

Before Nairobi, Ms. Manalo was Philippine delegate to the 1975 World Conference on Women in Mexico City, which opened the decade; and after that, to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, where she chaired the Group of 77.

In the same year that Nairobi happened, Ms. Manalo was appointed Philippine ambassador to Belgium, Luxemborg and the European Economic Community - one of the only two women among 101 ambassadors accredited to the European Community, the other one coming from Jamaica.

Besides the European community, Ms. Manalo’s career has also brought her into the center of Asean affairs, having been among those who saw it grow from a fledgling group of five Southeast Asian countries to the big regional bloc commanding attention.

In the 1976, she was named deputy secretary general of the Asean National Secretariat, a position which she used to advantage to promote the cause of women. She organized the machinery for the establishment of the Asean permanent committee of representatives for the government sector for the private sector; the Asean Confederation of Associations of Women. Women leaders from the original member countries - Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia - thus found a forum for articulating the concerns of women in development. At that time, the concept of women as being integral to development was not yet as widely accepted.

Right in her own backyard, Ms. Manalo pushed this advocacy of integrating women in development. On the invitation of the then director general of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), Gerardo Sicat, Ms. Manalo prepared a memorandum outlining how women can be integrated into development planning. In an interview with journalist Domini Torrevillas Suarez in 1976, Ms. Manalo said including women in development planning need not necessarily mean that women sit on the planning board. The planners "could be all men, so long as there is that conscious effort to plan for the integration of women, particularly the women of the rural areas, because we have to help them, relieve them of their burdens, as they have had no training, most of them are illiterate, when in fact they constitute more than one-half of the resources of the country. "

This same attitude - rejecting tokenisms while advocating the substance of feminism - would permeate her other roles as a public servant, both here and abroad. It will be an interesting mark of her long advocacy of women’s concerns that, having reached the pinnacle of both national and international organizations as one of a few women to have broken through the gender barrier, she would use her exalted position to continually call for reforms in political, economic, and social systems that have marginalized women for decades and prevented them for being full partners in development.

Lately, Ms. Manalo has brought her experience and wisdom from the ECC and Asean stints into the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, where she represents the country as Senior Official. She was one of those who pushed the holding in October, 1998, of the first Apec Ministerial Meeting on Women, with the theme of "Women in Economic Development and Cooperation in Apec." It was inspired partly by the fact that the 1996 Apec summit in Subic had advocated greater participation of women in Apec’s economic and technical cooperation agenda.

She is also the Philippine representative to the New York-based UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1992-2002).

An article in the Straits Times in 1975 portrayed Ms. Manalo as scoffing at the hardline antics of Western women libbers and saying that for women in developing nations, the more vital concern was to effectively participate "in the progress and economic development of the nation."

That attitude springs from actual practice. Although blessed with an enlightened father - in some earlier interviews she described him as "the feminist in the family" - who encouraged her to excel in school and in her career, and to be independent, Ms. Manalo has always made sure to balance her life as wife and mother with her very demanding work. For this, she gives much credit to her mother, who stayed home and helped her care for her children.

From the start of her career as diplomat, Ms. Manalo had been breaking barriers as a woman: She was the first woman to pass the Philippine Foreign Service Officers’ Examinations in 1959. She was based in Manila for 18 years before getting her first foreign assignment, but since her husband was himself a distinguished career diplomat, there were many difficult separations.

"Sometimes, my husband and I would only meet at the airport when we were on our way to different places in the world." When she got the post in Brussels, as representative to the ECC, the whole family lived together for the first time, separating again after six years.