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The Expert Group Meeting on Adolescent Girls and their Rights Statement by Addis Ababa,
Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, May I first of all extend to you a warm welcome to Addis Ababa, to the Economic Commission for Africa and to the United Nations Conference Centre (UNCC). The theme of this meeting, Adolescent Girls and their Rights, is one that is close to our hearts here at ECA, and key to the development of Africa itself. Your expertise in this field is vital to the work of the 42nd session of the Commission on the Status of Women. It is pleasing to note that this meeting is brokered by four UN entities, a clear demonstration of the synergy UN agencies are already developing in the spirit of the Secretary-General's reforms. This meeting provides an important and timely opportunity for us to situate the adolescent African girl child in the context of African youth in general, and to reiterate the fact that the rights of adolescent girls are the rights of us all. We need only to look at the statistics to see how crucial the youth of Africa are - and will be - to the development of the continent. 64 per cent of Africa's population is under the age of 25, compared to 50 per cent globally 290 million of Africa's 650 million people are children half of that number are adolescents (i.e. between the ages of 10 and 15) African women and girls make up 52 per cent of Africa's population Of that figure, almost half are girls between 0 to 15 Today's children, adolescents and young people in general, will be Africa's leaders in the next millenium. In their hands will rest economic, social, political and developmental responsibility - from the family and village level to the national and continental level. As a sub-set of Africa's adolescents. our girls -- the women of the future -- are subject to the most profound disadvantages, and it is our task to level the playing field. The indicators are daunting: One in 20 African women runs the risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes. Girls die sooner than boys. On the continent, more die before they reach the age of 5. In Togo the figure is 20 per cent; in Cameroon, 17 per cent, and Burundi 13 per cent. More than half the women in sub-Saharan Africa over 25 years of age are illiterate. Consistently, across the continent,
fewer women than men can read and write. In Sudan, the ratio of female-to-male adult
literacy is as low as 28 per cent. The comparable ratios are 32 per cent in Burkina Faso
and 35 per cent in Sierra Leone. Ladies and Gentlemen, There are overwhelming arguments as to why we should invest in girls today to ensure a level playing field for the woman of tomorrow. Clearly, it is a moral imperative. It is the fair thing to do. But investing in women is also essential for reducing poverty and promoting growth. Today, two out of five people in Africa live in poverty; the majority are women and children. And these women find it harder than men to escape the poverty trap. The empirical evidence on the positive economic returns from female parity is overwhelming. Supporting a stronger role for the African women will contribute to economic growth, reduce fertility, improve child survival, and slow the population explosion. These are all proven ways to help achieve and maintain family stability and accelerate national development. We know for certain that returns on investment in women's and girls' education and health are significantly greater that those on similar investments in boys and men. This is largely because of the strong interaction between women's schooling, health, nutritional status and fertility on the one hand, and, on the other, the synergistic effect of this interplay on Africa's education, health and productivity in the future. Simulations on data from a group of African countries show that fertility rates fall and child mortality rates decrease with increased rates of education of girls as they become women. Recent research findings, for example, show that giving African girls four to six years of education could lower the mortality of children under 5 by nearly 40 percent. The reason is obvious. Women who know how to read and write understand better how to space their children and nurture their families. A similar situation prevails in the work arena. For example, simulations on data from Kenya indicate that if all girls received just one year of primary schooling, their agricultural yield as working women would increase by 24 percent. When you consider that African women produce approximately 75 percent of the continent's food, you can see how such increases in the productivity of Africa's women farmers could significantly raise the performance of the agricultural sector on the continent. The associated improvements in the food security of households would also be dramatic. Recent studies also demonstrate that gender inequalities, especially in the accumulation of human capital, pose major constraints on growth. But we know for sure that even now, when the time spent on home production and in agriculture and non-agriculture activities, is valued, women contribute 40-60 percent of household income. Much of this effort goes formally unrecorded, but it is clear to see. Yet, despite the overwhelming arguments in favour of investing in girls and women and enhancing their role in development, nations and households in Africa and elsewhere in the world continue to under-invest in this vital human resource. By so doing in Africa, we are depriving the majority of our people of the opportunity to benefit from development, or even to contribute fully to it. We at ECA are fully committed to
gender equality, with all it implies and entails. In the newly-restructured ECA, defined
by strategic focus, our aim is to become a policy integrator, a networker and a
disseminator of development ideas and best practices among the ECA Member States. Gender
is one of the Commission's cross-cutting concerns, with the African Centre for Women (ACW)
upgraded to full Division status and charged with providing policy and advisory guidance
to ensure that gender is mainstreamed in all aspects of ECA's work programmes. The five
thematic areas of ECA's work -- social and economic policy analysis, food security and
sustainable development, development management, development information, and regional
cooperation -- all have gender as a cross-cutting theme. We are currently in the process
of defining the necessary tools to achieve this objective. What is more, we are giving special
attention to sensitising African governments to the overall welfare loss and social
inequities caused by the barriers imposed on girls and women. We will be advocating the
adoption of national strategies to enhance women's participation in economic
transformation and development, promoting best practices on how to remove constraints on
women, and fostering the exchange of experiences and information among women economic
operators in the region. In this regard, ECA is organizing a major consultation conference scheduled to take place next April. The conference, entitled 'Forging Partnerships for Africa's Future: Gender Perspectives", will bring together high level African policy-makers from various sectors, representatives of civil society, representatives of African subregional and regional organizations, and experts from different parts of the world. Several heads of state are expected to attend. Issues to be discussed: How to use macro-economic policy initiatives to secure the access by women and men to productive resources How to build machinery for grassroots (and in particular women's participation in decisions that affect the economic environment How to use Information and Communication to facilitate dialogue and partnership around the priority concerns of women and men The role of adolescents and youth in the formulation of health, education and employment programmes How to develop partnerships Ladies and Gentlemen, Over the next three days, you will be studying closely and discussing in detail the situation of the adolescent girl child in Africa. You will articulate the forms of discrimination that hamper the growth and development of the girl child and her full participation in development. You will look at the plight of adolescent girls in extreme circumstances, including harmful and disabling child labour, warfare and other forms of organized and large-scale violence, sexual abuse and exploitation, childhood disabilities, and deficient laws and abusive legal and judicial processes. What needs to be emphasized is that human rights are broad and wide-ranging, and in pushing for justice we should look at all the development goals we have for the adolescent girl in Africa as rights to which they are entitled. I see at least four critical areas in which Governments -- supported by the development community, NGOs and civil society -- must take the lead through decisive and swift public actions that remove gender disparities: 1. Modifying laws and regulations to truly ensure equal opportunity. In this first regard, we know from experience that, as with model constitutions, equitable laws and regulations are at times not worth the paper they are written on. Therefore, there has to be further public action ensuring that gender-neutral laws officially on the books are enforced in reality both nationally and locally. 2. Ensuring macro-economic
stability and improving micro-economic incentives. Sound macro-economic policies are
important: for example, as the shoppers for their households, women's roles can be the
first and hardest hit by inflation; as producers of goods, women can be the first and
hardest hit by artificially cheap imports that compete one-on-one with the products of
their labour. Conversely, many women can be the first to benefit from a focus on
labour-demanding growth. There is still much room for government policy-makers to clear
their heads on what works and what doesn't for women in this area. 3. Redirecting public spending towards investments that offer high social returns on service, for example, improving basic services like education, health care, and water supply. As I have already described, the payoffs for girls and women, and for society as a whole, from investments in health and education are clear. And as for investments in water supply, I cannot put it more graphically and powerfully than Gertrude Mongella who said: "Where are we without water? How can we develop, as long as most of our water is carried on women's heads?" 4. Targeting interventions to correct gender inequalities where wide disparities persist. A good example is providing scholarships for girls in order to correct gender gaps in school enrolment rates. Schooling is never free, even when the government picks up much of the bill. Parents incur direct costs (in terms of school fees, books and clothing) and opportunity costs (because they forego their children's labour for child care and household chores). Scholarships and stipends for girls that reduce this financial burden offer parents incentives to enrol their girls in school and subsequently reduce gender gaps in school enrolment. Other issues that we should prioritize, as part of the process of empowering girls, include: Citizenship training, whereby girls are apprised of their importance in the context of their country's development. Access to information in a way that imparts useful life skills and includes the adolescent girl as a participant in information and communication flows rather than a mere recipient of filtered messages. Today's children are tomorrow's leaders. Today's adolescent girls are tomorrow's entrepreneurs, mothers, care-givers, parliamentarians, doctors, lawyers and heads of state. But today, they are vulnerable, and reliant on us, the adults of today. Their future is contingent on our combined resolve to ensure that they can indeed aspire to such lofty heights as they make the often difficult transition from girlhood to womanhood. We have to be the guardians of the adolescent girl child, the watchdogs of their rights. We have to inculcate in them values that inspire them to achievement, that sow the seeds of responsibility and the ethic of development, particularly in the light of the major development challenges Africa is now facing. Thank you for your kind attention and I wish you the best in your deliberations. |
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