At the top of the current agenda, says Ms. Lalla Ben Barka, Deputy Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), is seeing to the implementation at local, national and sub-regional level of the results of ECA's 28 April-1 May conference. This is why ECA is "deepening" its working relations with institutional partners, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other parts of civil society. This is also why the conference "was not planned as something 'for women only' but for all of us to look at gender issues together."
Photo: Libya Mullugetta
ECA takes gender equity "very seriously." Indicators of that commitment include her own appointment in February as the first woman Deputy Executive Secretary in ECA's 40-year life, and the fact that the directors of three of its five substantive divisions are women. These appointments, she adds, signal recognition by Executive Secretary K.Y. Amoako that any institution involved in African development has to make progress on gender issues within its own house.
Ms. Ben Barka, from Mali, is a winner of the UNESCO Literacy Prize, and has a doctorate from the University of Southern California. She has also worked widely in West Africa on education and gender issues, including with NGOs and UN agencies. This includes working for some 15 years with women in villages on literacy and on strategies to improve their conditions.
From her own broad experience, she argues that development strategies tend to lack the crucial element of sustainability due to inadequate analysis of what works best in practice. Ms. Ben Barka says "we would do very good work as women if we review our concepts, our understanding, our strategies, our action, document them, go to theory, and use the theory for our practice." She feels the "women with diplomas" should focus more on these areas.
During the conference, Ms. Ben Barka chaired a meeting held to launch publications of ECA's African Centre for Women (ACW). Among these is a Compendium of Good Practices which, she recalls, some people criticized because two-thirds of the success stories come from the World Bank. The critics argued that they have their own experiences at micro level. "I was pleased with this," Ms. Ben Barka says, "but I asked how many of them take the time to document their work with grassroots women?" She points out that the ACW had asked women's groups for two-and-a-half-page contributions to the Compendium, and not received enough of them.
She knows there is good work being done, but she insists that it must be documented to be properly shared, reviewed, criticized and improved upon. She also says she is not comparing NGOs and activists unfavorably with the resource-rich World Bank, but simply challenging them because "we need more thinking by women about the strategies for women's advancement." Through its publications, she adds, the ACW is "first of all trying to share more and more information. Then you will get more people doing deeper and critical analysis. But it is not easy." She repeats the invitation for women's groups to contribute to the Compendium, stressing that "they have so much to say and to share."
