CONFERENCE ENDS ON HIGH NOTE
AS AFRICAN LEADERS ENDORSE PUSH FOR WOMEN'S ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT

At a Forum of Heads of state and Government, the leaders -- President Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, President Festus Mogae of Botswana, Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Algeria's Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia, Ghana's Vice-President John Atta-Mills, and Uganda's Vice-President Wandira Specioza Kazibwe -- reiterated the need to eradicate poverty in Africa with specific attention to women, who bear the brunt of poverty on the continent. Also participating in the Forum was United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan -- who is in Ethiopia on the first leg of an 11-day tour of several countries in eastern Africa -- ECA Executive Secretary K. Y. Amoako, and Organization of African Unity (OAU) Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim, who chaired the event.

Vice-president Kazibwe received a standing ovation from the delegates for her intervention, in which she stressed Africa's need to get its priorities right -- beginning with meeting basic requirements like food and shelter -- before addressing what she described as somewhat "esoteric" concerns. "How can we get into the global village when we have no food, shelter or water? How can you can yourselves men when there is no food in your homes?" she asked. On the subject of information and communication technologies, one of the four themes of the Conference, the Ugandan vice-presidentargued that while their use and development was were important, they would not necessarily solve Africa's problems or even become utilizable as long as basic needs continued to go unfulfilled. President Mogae identified poverty as being at the root of Africa's problems, adding that poverty had increasingly become feminized.

Prime Minister Zenawi said he supported meaningful affirmative action for Africa's women, as long as it was devoid of tokenism. He exhortedwomen to be the agents of their own development, telling a panel of African women in the Forum that "in my experience, if you want something you have to take it, no one is going to give it to you." Without ensuring linkages with grassroots women, he insisted, the goal of empowering women would remain utopian. Earlier, at a consultative meeting held by more than 60 African ministers, ECA's convening power was applauded and the ministers asked that similar meetings be held in future, and if possible institutionalized.

The ministers from member states were drawn from a wide range of disciplines, including education, finance, land and agriculture. They agreed that many of the strategies and actions suggested by participants at the conference could, if implemented, lead to gender equity and as such greater participation of women in economic development and governance. The ministers remarked that the youth present at the conference demonstrated a concern for their future and a readiness to participate in development activities of their nations.

The Conference, which coincided with the 40th anniversary of ECA, was convened in the context of the mandate of ECA's African Centre for Women (ACW) to support implementation of the global and regional platforms of action aimed at economic and political empowerment of women. Close to 1,000 people -- among them policy-makers, civil society leaders, NGO representatives, youth, and bilateral partner and UN agency representatives -- took part in the Conference, which emerged with a number of strategic proposals for action, among them:

Including a gender perspective in national accounts and other data;

Establishing partnerships to mainstream gender in key institutions and mechanisms;

Establishing mechanisms to ensure gender-disaggregated national statistics and accounts;

Integrating gender concerns into national budgetary procedures;

Promoting and protecting women's access to and ownership of land in rural and urban areas;

Facilitating women's access to markets and regional trade, and building their entrepreneurial capacity; * Mobilizing

resources for the setting up of community social services and insurance programmes to facilitate women's access to basic social services; and

Promoting gender-sensitive credit schemes.

To ensure follow-up and implementation of the Conference outcomes, the organizers are convening tomorrow with some of ECA's partners, in particular NGO actors, to concretize on next steps. The organizers will seek endorsement of the strategic actions from a larger group of African leaders at the upcoming OAU summit in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in June. In addition, ECA intends to organize a number of sub-regional meetings, to sensitize a wider audience about the Conference outcomes as well as to galvanize local alliances of women into advocacy and lobbying at the national level.