This chapter continues the discussion of educated Sambas Malay women who challenge the strictures of Sambas’ socioeconomic and political peripherality through forms of cross-border mobility related to education, training, and more profitable forms of livelihood. Its focus is a West Kalimantan NGO that is well known for its activities in Sambas. Outside public service and a limited number of private enterprises, NGOs offer one of the few employment opportunities for tertiary-educated women in Sambas. The discussion in this chapter concentrates on female activists, predominantly Sambas Malay, who are involved in the NGO's pemberdayaan perempuan (‘women's empowerment’) program, or WEP. These women's borderscope of mobility is the least territorially anchored of the borderscopes analysed in this book. Even more than the public sector women described in Chapter Four, the NGO women did not pursue avenues to advance their own or other Sambas Malay women's interests that involved movement of people or goods over the international border. However, the territorial border remained a constitutive feature of their borderscope, as it was considered emblematic of Sambas’ marginality; it was this marginality, rather than the border, that must be crossed to contest Sambas Malay women's disadvantages.

There is considerable overlap between the borderscope of the NGO women and that of the public sector women described in the last chapter. Both share a vision of Sambas Malay advancement, understood as educational and socioeconomic ‘border crossings’; both also demonstrated an educated/ uneducated divide in their programs that was animated by a reading of the past as uneducated and the desired future as educated. Their imaginaries of the borders that need to be crossed place Sambas Malay women in a specific borderlands territory that was further coloured by a distinction between rural and urban.

There were, however, differences between the two groups. First, a concern with gender and other forms of structural inequality was only prominent amongst the NGO workers. Another significant difference relates to the forms of power and influence exercised by the two groups. While there was an element of governmentality in the work of the NGO activists, they did not have access to formal political power or the authority of the government like the public sector women had.