Recommendations of the Sixth African Regional Conference

Annex I

Recommendations of the Sixth African Regional Conference

The participants at the Sixth African Regional Conference on Women formulated many recommendations during their deliberations, including:

Strengthen partnerships between governments, NGOs, civil society, and United Nations agencies;

Build NGO capacity;

UNFPA should ensure that the issues raised by the Conferences at Beijing and at Cairo are integrated in the national census;

Ministers responsible for Women Affairs should participate in the ECA Conference of Ministers of Planning, in order to advocate for integration of the gender perspective in national planning;

Promote traditional methods of resolving conflicts and involve women in them;

Promote the participation of men in the different statutory meetings on women;

Promote participation of women in conflict-resolution mechanisms;

Balance the participation of women and men in the different national and international statutory meetings;

Promote the gender perspective in the various ministerial departments of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF);

Establish specific indicators for enhancing measurement of the progress achieved by governments;

Strengthen institutional mechanisms responsible for promoting women and girls with human, material and financial resources, and upgrade their status;

Appeal to countries of the North to make anti-retro-virus products for treating HIV/AIDS more affordable and accessible to the African population;

Appeal to women of the North to lobby against the manufacture and selling of arms;

Member States should integrate gender-desegregated data in national accounts;

Utilise the gender perspective in the national budgetary process;

Establish databanks and institutions for producing gender-desegregated data;

Carry out advocacy with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to grant a delay of 15 years to African States to allow them to fulfil the conditions set by this Organisation. It is also necessary to include women in the national delegations that participate in negotiations and debates at the WTO, in order to ensure that the gender perspective is taken into account;

The African Development Bank (ADB) should establish a Development Bank for Women;

Revitalise conflict-prevention mechanisms in Africa;

African countries should ban small arms;

Increase financing of gender activities;

Debt conversions by African States to allow more expenditure on social sectors, especially poverty reduction;

Appeal to all African governments to support peace;

Take measures against the trafficking of women and children, and their exploitation;

Organise a continent-wide march against poverty;

Apply the 20/20 initiative;

Reduce government military spending;

Promote a culture of peace;

Promote respect for the United Nations Charter on Territorial Sovereignty;

Form a solidarity movement of high-level women to carry out sensitisation in countries at war and in countries producing arms;

Train health workers and equip health centres with the necessary equipment for handling obstetrical emergencies, to reduce maternal and infant mortality;

Strengthen UNIFEM with human, material and financial resources;

Strengthen ACW with human, material and financial resources, given the quality and the quantity of the work it performs;

Carry out capacity building for women’s economic empowerment;

Implement a quota system of 50 per cent to enhance representation of women in decision- making positions;

Mobilise the support of ECA, OAU and UNICEF in the fight against drugs in all forms and derivatives, that put our boys and girls at risk;

ACW should support countries in their effort to establish mechanisms for collecting reliable gender-desegregated data;

Encourage private, independent radio stations to foster production of special programmes, particularly for women;

Strengthen coordination mechanisms among United Nations Agencies, at all levels within countries;

Establish institutional mechanisms for follow-up of national implementation of the Platforms for Action.

Two countries, namely, Mauritania and Niger, have recently ratified the Convention on Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)