Ten Years After Beijing
By Gumisai Mutume*
Monday, August 15, 2005
There have been some progress made 10 years after Beijing. But major challenges remain
A decade ago, African women had reason to expect change following a much-heralded global conference that set ambitious targets to transform the live of women across the world. This year marks the 10th anniversary of that milestone event, the Fourth World Conference on Woman, held in Beijing, China, in 1995. Like their counterparts elsewhere, African woman are taking stock of progress and asking to what extent promised reforms have been implemented. They are also examining why progress has been limited in many countries and are seeking ways to overcome the obstacles.
During the last 30 years there have been a number of signs of improvement, UN special adviser on gender issues and advancement of women, Rachel Mayanja, told the 10-year review of the Beijing conference, in New York in March. There have been moves to implement the convention on the elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women, CEDAW, a UN protocol, as well as the development of new polices and guidelines and creation of networks of gender experts, she said, citing just a few examples.
However, over the same 30 years since the first world conference on women in Mexico City, "men have gone to the moon and back, Yet women are still at the same place they were -that is, trying to sensitise the world to the unwarranted and unacceptable marginalisation of women, which deprives them of their human rights," Mayanja told the delegates, who came from 165 countries.
In Africa specifically, women have made significant strides in the political arena over the past few years. The continental political body, the African Union, AU, took a major step by promoting gender parity in its top decision-making positions. In 2003 five women and five men were elected as AU commissioners. The following year, Gertrude Mongella was chosen to head the AU's pan-African parliament, where women make up 25 per cent of members. Another AU body, the African Peer Review Mechanism, which oversees standards for good governance, is led by Marie-Angelique Savane.
African women have also successfully promoted agreements that advance their rights. By the end of last year, 51 of the 53 AU member countries had ratified CEDAW, adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly and often described as the international bill of rights for women. And in 2003 activists succeeded in persuading their heads of state to adopt a protocol on the rights of women. They are now lobbying states to take the final step and ratify the protocol to make it enforceable.
"We are all aware that despite achievements and progress made, Africa women face major challenges and obstacles," Says Farkhonda Hassan, chairman of the UN Economic Commission for Africa's committee on women and development. For example, she says, the primary development policies in many countries, known as poverty reduction strategies, still do not take into account differences in income and power between men and women, hampering efforts to finance programmes that reduce inequality. In addition, she says, the majority of African women are still denied education and employment, and have limited opportunities in trade, industry and government.
Out of the 1995 conference emerged a plan, the Beijing platform of Action, which laid out areas that needed improvement if the position of women was to be improved. The areas include reducing poverty among women, stopping violence, providing access to education and health care and reducing economic and political inequality. Barring some notable exceptions, progress in these areas has been slow.
The Beijing platform should no longer be viewed as a set of simple goals and aspirations, says Hassan, but must be used as a tool to push for the adoption of gender-sensitive policies. "The objective now is not to renegotiate our dreams, but to emphasise the accountability of all actors through detailed discussions of goals, targets, achievements and failures," she says. "We are no longer seeking promises, but are demanding action."
For many African women, the Beijing platform and the various international instruments their governments have signed have yet to translate into positive changes in their daily lives. They remain at the bottom of the social hierarchy, with poor access to land, credit, health and education. While some of the agreements that African governments have ratified enshrine property and inheritance rights, in most countries women are denied those very rights.
Compounding the situation are setbacks such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic that is destroying the health of more women than men in Africa, eroding some of the development gains women had attained. As a result, poverty in Africa continues to wear a women's face, notes Gladys Mutukwa of the Zimbabwe-based non-governmental organisation, Women in Law and Development in Africa, WILDAF. She finds it disturbing that 10 years after Beijing, African women are much poorer.
Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people living in poverty dropped in all developing regions except Africa, where it increase by more than 82 million. Women make up the majority of the poor, as much as 70 percent in some countries. More often than not, men are more likely to find a job and enterprises run by men have easier access to support from institutions such as banks.
A UN Food and Agricultural Organisation study on Benin, Tanzania and Zimbabwe shows that woman rarely own land. When they do, their holdings tend to be smaller and less fertile than those of men. Studies also show that if women farmers had the same access to inputs and training as males, overall yields could be raised by between 10 and 20 percent.
But perhaps the most inhibiting factor is that women in Africa continue to be denied an education, often the only ticket out of poverty. Disparities between girls and boys start in primary educational system. In total enrolment in primary education, Africa registered the highest relative increase among regions during the last decade. But given the low proportion of girls being enrolled, the continent is still far from the goal of attaining intake parity by the end of this year. By 2000, sub-Saharan Africa was the region with the most girls out of school, 23 million, up from 20 million a decade earlier.
The total number of children out of school has declined during primary education increased from 596 million to 648 million, with the highest increase occurring in sub-Saharan Africa, which policies specifically targeting girls were responsible for considerable improvements in countries such as Benin, Botswana, the Gambia, Guinea, Lesotho, Mauritania and Namibia. In Benin, for instance, the gender gap narrowed from 32 to 22 percent, thanks to policies such as senitising parents through the media and reducing school fees for girls in public primary schools in rural areas.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, reports that girls' enrolments rise relative to boys as effective method of ensuring gender parity is to equalise the gender balance among teachers, a strategy Mauritania used to narrow the gender gap in primary schools from 13 to 14 percent between 1990 and 2000.
Guinea employed a broader approach, making girls' education a national priority during the early 1990s. After assessing the challenges faced by girls in school, the government embarked on programmes to build latrines, assist pregnant students, distribute free textbooks and increase the number of female teachers. By 2000. the country had more than doubled the number of girls in school and increased boys' attendance by 80 percent. But in general, Africa has the lowest proportion of female teachers of any region.
Numerous other hurdles continue to hamper the expansion of education in Africa. Austerity programmes introduced in many countries during the 1980s constrained educational spending. Governments had little money to maintain existing schools or build new ones. At the family level, households that became poorer often faced the stark choice of deciding whom to send to school-and often it was the girls who stayed home. Costs of tuition, the requirement to wear uniforms, long distances between home and school, inadequate water and sanitation, all help to restrict girls' access to education.
By the time children go through high school and reach college, the gender gap has become even wider. "At the tertiary and university levels the low participation for women continues," declared African government ministers gathered in Addis Ababa in October to take stock of the continent's progress since Beijing. "Gender gaps are particularly pronounced in science, mathematics and computer sciences."
As with a range of other historically male-dominated subjects, an International Labour Organisation, ILO, survey shows that women are starkly under-represented in technical programmes in African colleges. The share of women enrolled in polytechnic courses ranges from 40 percent in The Gambia to just 2 percent in Zambia, the ILO reports. In Ghana, even though 30 percent of all those attending polytechnics are women, only 1 percent of the total taking technical courses are women.
Africa, however, has registered improvements in adult literacy rates, which rose 20 percent between 1990 and 2000. The goal is to raise adult literacy rates by 50 percent by 2015, from the 1990 level. About half of sub-Saharan African countries have registered moderate increases towards gender parity in this area, UNESCO reports. However, in some countries the female illiteracy rates are much higher than the regional average of about 50 percent. In Burkina Faso it is 82 percent, in Sierra Leone 79 percent and in Benin and Ethiopia 77 percent.
Many now acknowledge that to enable women to escape poverty, development policies should place more emphasis on their contributions to the economy. Even though women make up a significant proportion of the economically active population, their contribution is not fully recorded because they are mainly engaged in family farming or in the informal sector. In other cases, what they do, such as household work, is not considered an economic activity.
In agriculture, sub-Saharan Africa's most vital economic sector, women contribute 60-80 percent of labour in food production, both for household consumption and for sale. But while they do most of the work, they lack access to markets and credit. In Uganda, women make up 53 percent of the labour force, but only sell 11 percent of the cash crops.
"I strongly hold the view that since days immemorial, women have played and continue to play a significant role in the economic and social development of their countries," says Namibia's women's affairs minister, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah. "What is at stake is that they are not visible, not recognised and not rewarded for the hard work they do." She says that each country should allocate a percentage of its national budget to gender issues. "This request is based on the fact that to date no country allocates more than 1 percent of its national budget to women and gender issues." Currently, resources for national programmes for the advancement of women come mainly from external partners.
Josephine Oudraogo of the African Centre for women in Addis Ababa, says women's contributions through the household economy, which provides more than 70 percent of food in Africa, are not adequately counted in national statistics. "Fewer than 10 African countries conduct systematic tie-use or household surveys," she says. This makes it difficult to identify disparities between the sexes and design remedial policies.
To redress the bias in macro-economic policies that favours men and boys at the expense of women and girls, a number of African countries have adopted a tool known as gender budgeting. Tanzania and Uganda are among the countries currently assessing their budgets along gender lines. This involves analysing government spending choices and their impact on women and men, boys and girls, with the aim of better identifying disparities. That in turn can help mobilise more financing to narrow the gaps, for example by funding programmes to reduce the heavy time burdens on women or by improving their access to energy, water, transport and labour -saving technologies.
At a meeting in April 2004 to review women's progress since Beijing, non-governmental organisasations, NGOs, from the Southern African Development Community, SADC, called on its 14 member countries to adopt gender budgeting by December 2006.
Almost all SADC countries have a national government body that deals with gender issues. However, in the 10 years since Beijing, these units, departments or ministries "have become weak and unable to be responsive to the challenges presented by the struggle for gender justice," NGOs declared at an African social forum in Lusaka, Zambia. "Poor resource bases, few staff and no power or authority within governments to advance equality and justice for women are just a few of the constraints."
However, women in some countries in Southern Africa have moved into positions of political influence. In South Africa and Mozambiuque, for example, women hold 30 percent of the seats in parliament. In February 2004, Mozambique became the first country in the region to appoint a woman as prime minister, Luisa Diogo. In Rwanda, women lead the world in representation in national parliaments. There, 49 percent of parliamentarians are female, far more than the 30 percent target specified in Beijing. The world average is just 15 percent.
In 14 of 23 recent elections in African countries, women increased their parliamentary representation. Still, the situation is far from ideal. In the majority of these countries (20), women hold 10 percent or less of parliamentary seats. In Madagascar, Mauritania and Niger, for example, they occupy less than 5 percent of seats.
In some countries, the presence of women in parliament has made a difference in the adoption of gender-sensitive policies. Because of pressure from women, some countries now have affirmative action policies, such as quotas, to increase the number of women in decision-making positions. In South Africa, women parliamentarians succeeded in passing various pieces of legislation, such as those legalising abortion, countering domestic violence ad ensuring child support.
In Uganda, women parliamentarians helped to adopt legislation making rape a capital offence. In 2003, following a long delay, Mozambique passed a family law considered pivotal for the emancipation of women in that country. "If we had just one sex in parliament, the bill would have been weaker," says the country's higher education minister, Lidia Brito.
Because the continent is so diverse, the problems are very complex, says Wariaru Mbugua of the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender issues at the UN. "Therefore, in global debates, they should not be made simplistic or be reduced to a single denominator." For example, girls not only need access to primary education, but must also be protected from violence and harmful practices.
*UN Africa Renewal
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