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Releases ECA Press Release No. 92/1999 DAKAR AND BEIJING OPENED UP POSSIBILITIES BUT THE ROAD AHEAD IS LONG Addis Ababa, 22 November 1999 (ECA) – While the Beijing process of the last five years has helped popularize gender issues, set the climate for change and strengthened the network of women in Africa, the continent still has a long road to travel towards gender equality. This was the common thread that ran through statements delivered by speakers earlier today at the opening of the Sixth African Regional Conference on Women, convened by African countries to review the status of the implementation of the Dakar and Beijing Platforms of Action. More than 1,500 participants drawn from senior levels of governments, civil society, regional institutions, bilateral agencies, agencies of the United Nations, and multilateral partners are gathered here in Addis Ababa for the five-day conference, which aims to formulate and adopt a regional plan of action to accelerate the implementation of these Platforms, and to prepare for Beijing plus five, the Global Review that will take place next June in New York. In his keynote address, U.N. Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), K.Y. Amoako said the meetings and work of the last five years had given the women’s movement in Africa a clearer sense of what their choices should be. "More and more women feel that the choices are within their grasp – and further, that their own life choices are paving the way for Africa’s daughters. And I regard it as a particularly healthy sign that men of Africa are coming to understand the benefits that come from women making their own choices." "But", added Mr. Amoako, "we still have a long road to travel… Institutions and officials in administrative functions, especially in our legislatures and our courts, must follow up to ensure implementation of our plans. We have all learned that it is far easier and faster to change a law than to ensure its implementation. The paper barriers are coming down, but the behavioural barriers are still largely up." In order to track progress since Beijing, Mr. Amoako reported that ECA had requested reports from all its 53 member States, and had received reports from 43 countries. Of that number, 30 or more countries reported that they placed as areas of priority the following concerns: women and poverty; education and training of women and girls; women and health; and the human rights of women. The country reports, he said, also made it clear that women’s access to resources and services was still a cross cutting problem. Furthermore, in some areas progress had been eroded, and many of the old problems still persisted. Perhaps the most grave of threats to women was the advance of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. "The rapid and disproportionate spread of the disease to the women of Africa and the rising number of AIDS orphans have serious implications for our future," warned Mr. Amoako. The disastrous economic and social implications of this health crisis must move AIDS to the centre stage of our priorities." The ECA Executive Secretary cited three areas he said had not been given enough priority by African countries in their reports. The first of these was the issue of women and decision-making. He highlighted as success stories that fact that more than 30 per cent of South African parliamentarians (and at least 25 percent of cabinet ministers) were women, and that the first woman Governor of an African central bank had recently been appointed in Botswana. Such successes needed to be emulated in the rest of the continent. The second issue was the lack of appropriate institutional mechanisms. Mr. Amoako cited inadequate resource allocations for national gender focal points, poor outreach to rural areas, inadequate technical capacity and lack of institutionalized procedures for monitoring accountability. On the third issue, women and armed conflict, Mr. Amoako said it was surprising that it had only ranked as a priority in 15 African countries, when the reality was that "over the last five years, it is women who are giving us the early warning of conflict and who are pressing for demilitarization of our societies". He gave Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burundi as examples of countries where there was "a new activism by African women to press for peace". The ES noted four areas in which he hoped the conference would achieve impact: fostering a renewed effort to formulate and implement the right gender policies; improved monitoring and dissemination of progress and failures; linking performance to accountability; and increasing networking between NGOs, media, academia and the private sector. In conclusion, Mr. Amoako turned to the issue of fostering leadership within Africa, stressing that sympathetic leaders were needed to set the signals for accelerated progress. "But not every leader is a Mandela or a Mwalimu. So our task is more complex. We must help leaders to lead. We must help them understand how they stand to gain if they adopt our ideas. And, whenever they act on our behalf, we must acknowledge their help and encourage them to move even further." In her opening statement, Angela E.V. King, Special Adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women, stressed that in reviewing progress towards gender equality, it was important to be fully aware of new challenges that had arisen since Beijing. Drawing on the findings of the 1999 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development, Ms. King reported that while increased participation of women in paid work was a global reality and had risen in almost all regions of the world, Africa was the only region in which women’s employment had not grown substantially faster than men’s. Ms. King attributed this to globalization, which she said was having a major impact on the livelihoods and family welfare of women in the developing world. "In this region, commercialization of agriculture, characterized by a shift from household subsistence production to cash crop production had altered the gender division of labour and management of household resources. Men’s primary economic activity has become cash crops, while women have been expected to contribute labour to cash crop production as well as taking over the tasks that men usually carried out before, such as land preparation and tilling." Another trend was the increasing numbers of men migrating to urban areas in search of jobs, resulting in a striking increase in the number of female-headed households has increased in almost all regions -- particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where women now headed approximately 30 per cent of households. Privatization of land, added Ms. King, a trend associated with market-oriented agricultural policies, was also undermining women’s access to land. The limited, but socially recognized land rights women enjoy under the customary tenure systems are in danger of being lost during the transition to a market-based tenure system. Whether this transition occurs through land reform or market forces, men tend to acquire total legal ownership of land as heads of households where women become marginalized. Indeed, gender differences in ownership and control of land might be one of the most important factors that explain the gap in economic well being, social status and empowerment between men and women." Stressing that the UN community was already taking steps to integrate macroeconomics with social development, Ms. King conceded that more remained to be done to integrate gender equality dimensions into the UN’s normative policy and operational work to ensure that the twin goals of economic growth and the expansion of human capabilities are attained. These goals, said Ms. King, could only be reached when peace and security were in place. "Soldiers are no longer the main targets in war today. Some 90 per cent of the victims of war are civilians including women and children. Whether it is the abducting of girls into slavery, the use of rape and other forms of sexual violence, the total denial of the human rights of women, or revenge inflicted on women out of ethnic hatred, women and girls are the main targets in the conflicts of today." The importance of peace was echoed by Ethiopia’s President, Negasso Gidada, who told participants that stability was a necessary condition for the realization of the Beijing goals. "The future for all of us in Africa lies in the economic regeneration of our continent, without which the achievement of all those goals we cherish, including the realization of gender equality would be in vain. The condition for this is peace, thus the need for women to be at the vanguard of the struggle against all sources of conflict and discord within and between nations." (END) Depending on availability, the full text of addresses, statements and presentations are being made available on the 6th Regional Conference Home Page, which can be accessed at: http://www.bellanet.org/partners/aisi/6thregionalconference . This site also includes the programme as well as other relevant conference documents and reports. For more information on the Conference or to arrange interviews with participants, please contact: Peter da Costa |
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