From a social justice household in the newly independent Caribbean to the highest levels of international human rights advocacy, Clarke has spent more than four decades making space for women, challenging inequality and insisting that the struggle for justice must continue.
When Roberta Clarke reflects on the arc of her life, she does not describe it as a career so much as a way of living. At 66, she can trace an almost unbroken line between the household in which she grew up, the Caribbean that shaped her worldview and the decades she has spent working for gender equality and social justice. “My entire working life has been concerned with questions of social justice, equality and human rights,” she says.
That lifelong commitment will now be recognised with the International Women’s Forum of Trinidad and Tobago’s Inspirational Champion of Women Award, under the theme The Power of Possibility: Celebrating Five Years of Women Who Inspire Change, fittingly honouring Clarke for decades of work championing women’s rights.
Clarke, a lawyer and activist, has worked with UN Women, heading the Caribbean Office, the Libya programme and serving as the Regional Director for the East and Southern Africa, and Asia and the Pacific regions. In these portfolios, she directed programming that embedded gender-responsive policy and practice into national and regional development agendas. She was elected by the Organisation of American States (OAS) Assembly as a Commissioner of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) before serving as its president. She chaired the Barbados Population Commission and is affiliated with several international organisations, serving as the Chair of the International Commission of Jurists and as Chair of the Board of the Nobel Women’s Initiative.
Her story began in a newly independent region at a time when questions of colonialism, race, class, power and inequality were being debated with new urgency. “I came of age in the context of independence and decolonisation,” she recalls. “My interests have, since then, revolved around being part of a fairer and more just society for all.”
She was, by her own description, a child of the post-independence, Black Power generation. Her mother was from Dominica, her father from Barbados, and she eventually married a Trinidadian, becoming part of the T&T landscape, raising four children here. It is this layered Caribbean inheritance that has always been central to how Clarke sees herself, insisting on an identity that is not tightly bound to a specific country, but a Caribbean one.
Long before she had the language of international human rights law to describe it, Clarke was noticing the disparity between women and men around her. As a teenager, “I had an early consciousness of inequalities of women and men, reflected in an unequal burden of care in the family unit, offering men more freedom and entitlement.” She saw, too, the particular vulnerabilities faced by women and girls. Those observations were not abstract political questions. They were part of everyday life, and they helped shape the questions that would eventually define her professional life. Looking back, Clarke sees precious little separation between what would become her career and the concern for issues within her community. She describes herself as “very fortunate, as for my whole adult life, I’ve been able to merge my actual interests with making a living.”
Her first job after university offered an almost serendipitous confirmation that she was on the right path. At just 21, she worked at the University of the West Indies (UWI) on a project examining women’s realities in the Caribbean. It was a multidisciplinary social science project, drawing on anthropology and other fields to understand the lived experiences of Caribbean women. “How wonderful was it to fall into a space that matched what I was inquiring about in my social life,” she remembers. Through the project, she encountered social scientists working on gender equality and became increasingly concerned with dismantling discrimination against women and girls. At 22, she was given the opportunity to write an article about women’s political participation, and the issues she raised therein remain strikingly relevant, decades later.
That early work became the foundation of a much wider journey. Clarke went on to study sociology and law, combining an understanding of society with the legal tools through which change could be pursued. She worked with the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, CARFA, and embedded herself in the regional NGO movement of the 1990s, a period she remembers as “a golden era” for Caribbean civil society. It was a decade of normative standard-setting globally, rife with United Nations conferences and global summits, when international standards on issues including women’s rights were being established and NGOs from the Caribbean were actively participating in those conversations. For Clarke, it was an opportunity to connect local issues with global feminist movements and to understand how regional advocacy could influence international norms.
Her years practising as a lawyer brought another dimension to that understanding. Clarke focused on domestic violence and “saw firsthand both the possibilities and limitations of the law, especially concerning protection of victims and survivors.” Although legislation could provide protection and create avenues for justice, it could not dismantle the social conditions that allowed violence and inequality to persist. She subsequently entered the UN system, beginning a phase of her career at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and moving into increasingly senior regional and international positions, including leadership roles with UN Women in different parts of the world. Her work would eventually take her far beyond the Caribbean, but the questions that motivated her remained remarkably consistent.
Today, Clarke chairs the Coalition Against Domestic Violence and is on the Board of the Nobel Women’s Initiative. She has also served as President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, placing a Caribbean woman at the helm of a major hemispheric human rights institution.
She is careful, however, not to romanticise the progress that has been made. “Across the Caribbean,” she says, “our commitment has borne fruit. Discriminatory laws have been reformed. We don’t find many remnants of discrimination against women in law, but inequalities in culture continue.” Women’s participation in education has expanded dramatically, their presence in the labour market has grown, and women have claimed space in professions and institutions that were once overwhelmingly male. The enactment of domestic violence legislation across the region, and initiatives such as Partnerships for Peace that sought to engage men and boys in addressing violence, are examples of policy and practice moving forward. “You can see policy shifting and practices changing,” she says. “There is a lot more to do, but I’m not pessimistic.”
But the persistence of inequality parallel to those gains is impossible to ignore. Clarke points to the cultural practices and assumptions that continue to shape women’s lives, from the unequal burden of care to pay disparities, and the continuing prevalence of violence against women and girls. For Clarke, violence against women and girls remains one of the clearest expressions of inequality because it is a phenomenon that is ultimately about control. Reproductive rights, discrimination based on sexual orientation, poverty and the question of whether states are doing enough to address women’s unpaid care burden all remain part of the unfinished agenda.
That is why she rejects the idea that the struggle for equality can ever simply be declared won. “The struggle does not end, and gains have to be extended and defended against regressions,” she says. “Societies change, generations change and new forms of inequalities become apparent.” Her advice is to look beyond the frustrations of the present and take a longer view of history. The lives Caribbean people live today are different from those of their parents and grandparents because previous generations pushed for change, and the responsibility now is to continue that process. “You have to do your part,” she says. “When you feel frustrated, overwhelmed, think of who your contribution may be helping.” In an era marked not only by inequality but by climate crisis, conflict and disruption of the international rules-based order, Clarke believes there is no luxury in retreating into pessimism. Everyone, she argues, must be involved in making positive social change.
