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To participate in this collective endeavour, the African Centre for Women (ACW) has initiated a process of sharpening its tools for collecting and disseminating information on African Women. The making of this CD-ROM on the Status of Women in Africa is in line with one of its mandates under the Dakar (1994) and Beijing (1995) Platforms for Action. There can be no successful African development policy or genuine economic recovery without pursuing a strategy to bridge the existing information gap and provide regular gender-disaggregated data (GDD) to inform development policy-makers. During the International Conference on African Women and Economic Development held in May 1998 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of ECA, ACW circulated country brochures on African women, which were received with great interest. This important step is being carried further in the production of the CD-ROM with a view to facilitating the up-dating of statistics on women in Africa and allowing a greater number of institutions to use it as a reliable tool for deepening research and analysis. ACW’s aim in compiling this CD-ROM is to motivate the relevant national machineries to collaborate with the ECA in harmonizing their data. It is hoped that the CD-ROM and its sister publication, the book carrying the same title, will serve as working tools to be improved upon in future joint endeavours between the ECA and member countries. The ACW data protocol presented has been compiled from available and comparable data that can be systematically revisited and updated. Our aim is to set in motion a wide-scale effort of concerted action involving national bureaux of statistics, research institutions, co-operation agencies as well as regional and international partners, to collaborate in harmonizing the data between the United Nations systems and governments. Such concerted action should make it possible to promote an innovative and multi-disciplinary approach to utilizing fully gender-disaggregated data which would show more clearly the contribution of women to various development activities.
Methodology: To develop the CD-ROM and to compile the brochures beforehand, it was necessary to be guided by the selected critical areas that ACW would focus on. Indicators were then established with regard to these critical areas. Statistical data was sought from the sources published internationally, some of which were general in coverage while others were subject-specific. For example, UNESCO's Statistical Yearbook provided international data on education. The data found were analyzed and assessed for depicting the situation and trends in the status of women in Africa. Commentaries were compiled with respect to the critical areas. The data were presented in the text, in graphs and in statistical tables.
Difficulties encountered during the project implementation: It was apparent that no clear protocol of developing such indicators that would guide data collection was available for use by countries submitting data. The data submitted were mainly aggregated. The correct picture of women's status in Africa was therefore not easily determined. 'If development is not engendered, it is endangered’ UNDP, Human Development Report, 1997 (p.7). The unavailability of data in some critical areas was of major concern. For example, women’s contribution to the economic sector, more particularly to household and national development, does not appear in the existing sources that have tended to consider the formal sector as the only existing arena of economic activity. There lacks a gender and people-centred perspective in assessing the contribution of women and the poor. There is need for African planners and statisticians to recognize the emerging informal sector and the household/community economy that were until the recent past, not accorded the importance they deserve. Secondly, African countries portrayed lack of co-ordination and harmonization in the management of data as essential tools for women's advancement, development and peace. Thirdly, the published data available had many gaps in coverage that affected their interpretation on the status of women.
Statistical sources: These have been acknowledged in the tables and graphs, to mainly include serial publications of The Inter-Parliamentary Union, World Bank and UN Agencies. They are: Statistical Yearbook, UNESCO; The State of the World's Children, UNICEF; The Progress of Nations; Human Development Report, UNDP; Inter-parliamentary Union map; African Development Indicators, World Bank; World Development Report, World Bank.
Beneficiaries: This CD-ROM will be useful to policy-makers, planners and statisticians and to all ministries seeking to mainstream gender in their programmes, such as Ministries of Women Affairs, Information, Finance and Planning, Agriculture and Health. Others such as Parliaments, Gender Units in Inter-Governmental Organizations and Regional and Subregional Organizations, Women Journalist Networks and other national, subregional and regional women's organizations, bilateral and multilateral partners will all find the CD-ROM beneficial. The CD-ROM will also be useful to research institutes seeking gender-disaggregated data, and to NGOs and women’s organizations wishing to assess their country’s performance in the implementation of the Dakar and Beijing Platforms of Action. The presentation of the general tables on all the countries will enable comparisons while facilitating a focus on each country about a given indicator. ACW would greatly appreciate readers’ comments on content and presentation at the following address. The
Director, We hope you enjoy using this CD-ROM!
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