The ECA conference had four themes: the role of women in developing African economies; African women and the information age: a new window of opportunity; the essential participation of women in achieving good governance; and creating opportunities for Africa's new generation.
Discussions on the first two themes, particularly on getting gender into national accounts and national budgets (see article "Stonger NGOs needed for grassroots work"), brought out the combination of technical and political work that must be done. A crucial question common to the sessions on governance and on the new generation was how to create the conditions for meaningful participation in decision-making. The recommendations included better education (including legal), as well as economic empowerment.
Noting the various constraints on women's participation in politics, the conference called for affirmative action at all levels of political, legal and administrative structures. This would help counter a situation where women's representation in African parliaments is only 11 per cent, far below the 30 per cent target set by the UN Economic and Social Council.
An ECA discussion paper notes that women's NGOs along with governments in some countries are trying to increase women's participation at national and local level. Uganda's Constitution stipulates that each administrative district must have one woman parliamentarian, and one-third of local government representatives must be women. South Africa's African National Congress reserves 30 per cent of its parliamentary seats and 50 per cent of its local government seats for women. Other countries making notable progress, the ECA paper says, include Namibia and Tanzania, which have quotas for women's representation, along with Mozambique and the Seychelles. And Botswana, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia are among the countries where women's participation has become a key issue, and NGOs are supporting women candidates at elections.
However, the paper points out, such NGO and government initiatives focus on elective office rather than other areas in which critical decision-making takes place, thereby directing efforts more at how to fit into existing power structures than at transforming them.
The question of transforming structures also came up in discussions on new information and communications technology (ICT).
Given the growing number of ICT initiatives under way in Africa, it is urgent to analyze projects and the proposed beneficiaries from a gender perspective, said Ms. Gillian Marcelle of the UN University Institute of New Technologies. In a paper prepared for the conference, she observed that with 12 per cent of the world's population, Africa has only 2 per cent of the world's phone lines. There is one telephone line for some 235 Africans, most of them in cities; and installation and maintenance costs are the highest in the world. Most importantly, there is poor coordination between ICT policy and national development needs, particularly in key economic and social sectors.
Women's empowerment is not addressed in the current deregulation and liberalization of communications resources in Africa, added Ms. Aida Opoku-Mensah, Director of the Panos Institute in Lusaka. Computer literacy is becoming "an indispensable tool for organizing and mobilizing communities, and women need to be directly involved." But women who criticize the media's role in reinforcing discrimination must now discuss whether to "create their own closed spaces on the Internet or assert their presence in mixed spaces," she said.
Women around the world are using ICTs for advocacy, and in Africa, such organizations as ABANTU for Development, SangoNet, Environment and Development ActionThird World (ENDA) and the Association for Progressive Communications, are conducting training for women's groups, Ms. Opoku-Mensah reported. In Uganda, the Forum for Women in Democracy accesses relevant information on the Internet for women parliamentarians to help them in their legislative work. Women's groups are also uniquely placed to facilitate access to ICTs for small-scale farmers, petty traders and housewives.
She urged women's groups to play a role in the evolution of the ICT landscape in Africa, and to exert influence on the two main agents -- national governments and specialized UN agencies such as the International Telecommunications Union and UNESCO. New networks such as WomenNet and the Reproductive Rights Alliance in South Africa should also engage governments in dialogues on communications policy.
But to do all this, activists must know what they are talking about, Ms. Opoku-Mensah warned. Among other things, women's groups should identify women's specific needs and opportunities, assess the positive or negative impact of ICTs on women, and relate these elements to a country's general and sectoral development practices and goals, she concluded.
Making
women visibleDiscussions on the first theme -- the role of women in economic development -- made links between the problems at different levels. Africa is now said to need 9 per cent annual economic growth to reduce poverty substantially. The previous estimate was 6 per cent, and the region is barely managing 4 per cent growth, said Ms. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Liberian party leader and former Assistant Administrator of the UN Development Programme. Faster growth at macro level has little positive effect on ordinary people, added Ms. Ngone Diop of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). In any case, Ms. Yacine Fall of the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) declared, the neo-liberal economic policies of the past 15 years have been a failure. Evidently, the appropriate type of growth is one that promotes gender equity, concluded Ms. Sarah Ocran of Third World Network - Africa.
In the first place, other speakers pointed out, women are generally "invisible" in national accounts and economic policy throughout the continent. An ECA paper states that over two-thirds of the energy-depleting and time-consuming activity of millions of women, girls, boys and men is unrecorded, in the unpaid reproductive sector and the informal sector. This keeps the livelihoods of millions of Africans outside the reach of policy. Dominant economic theory assumes that women's and children's time and energy in unpaid production and social reproduction are limitless and can be considered outside the "economic domain."
But women's time and energy are used in both the "unpaid, non-marketed sector of social reproduction and the paid formal monetized economy" and form a crucial link between the two "which cannot be ignored in economic analysis and policy formulation," the paper notes.
Such observations led conference participants to decide to push their countries forward in terms of national accounts and other data that are disaggregated by gender, and national budgets that are gender-sensitive. One speaker said governments have been "using weak data to make big policies." Another said it is a conceptual challenge for some governments to link accurate data to policy making, and to evaluate the impact of their policies. And while it is now acknowledged that policies have different effects on women, men, girls and boys, participants agreed that if the impact is unknown, then budget allocations cannot be optimized.
It will take advocacy, political will and clear guidelines to collect the data that accurately reflect the economic and social realities of men and women, participants said in the workshop on national accounts and other data, chaired by Gambia's Education Minister, Ms. Satang Jow. Among the first steps, said ECA Regional Adviser on Statistical Systems, Ms. Awa Thiongane, is to redefine economic activity to include the unpaid, unquantified and unrecorded activities and services performed by women. This will result in more accurate information on women's real contribution to the gross national product. The weakness of data-collection services in many countries could have a positive aspect, one participant said: it will be easier to build in the gender perspective as the services grow stronger.
It will also take time and improved methods. Tunisia, for example, has a gender project steering committee which has members from different departments and seeks to connect the gender perspective in concrete ways in specific sectors, said Mr. Imed Melitti of that country's Ministry of Women's Affairs.
Leading the working group on budgetary policies and procedures, the Director-General of Namibia's Department of Women's Affairs, Ms. Netumbo Ndaitwah, related the work done in late 1997 to launch a gender analysis of the budget, sensitize officials and develop methods for disaggregating revenue data. Other valuable contributions came from a range of countries including Côte d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Zambia. Mr. John Maina, of Kenya's Central Bureau of Statistics, stressed the need for policy-makers to grasp the gender-specific effects of budgets on the expenditure side (allocations) and on the revenue side (taxes).
Civil society organizations and NGOs have an important role to play in sensitizing governments to gender concerns, said Ms. Colleen Lowe Morna, Chief Executive Officer of South Africa's Commission on Gender Equality. That country's "women's budget initiative" came primarily from civil society, she noted, and led to detailed analysis of how the 1996/97 budget was spent. For example, less than 2 per cent of the education budget went into adult basic education, although most illiterate people are women. And while 75 per cent of the trade and industry budget benefitted exporters, who are mainly men, only 2 per cent went to small and medium enterprises, in which women often predominate.
Due to pressure from the women's movement, Ms. Lowe Morna continued, South Africa agreed at a Commonwealth meeting in November 1996 to be one of two countries (the other is Sri Lanka) in a pioneering effort to integrate gender concerns into macro-economic policies. This led to South Africa's first budget with gender disaggregated figures, presented last March, and the country's Finance Minister must report on progress to his Commonwealth peers this September, she said.
The conference called for further partnerships, at national, regional and international level, to mainstream gender in key institutions. The Coordinating Committee on African Statistical Development was specifically urged to set up a task force on gender in national accounts and other data. Participants also asked ECA to undertake a gender-based evaluation of public spending and revenue in African countries. They said the Nairobi-based Collaborative Centre on Gender, the ABANTUfor Development NGO (based in Kaduna, London and Nairobi), and UNDP could help in training officials to draw up gender-sensitive budgets.
Poverty reduction involves a reduction of "time-poverty," suggested Prof. Indu Grover, of the Agricultural University at Hisar, India. Instead of the long hours of drudgery with low productivity, women's time will be more productive with better tools in the household and in the fields, she observed.
Similarly, a World Bank draft paper on Gender, Growth, and Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa notes that unlike men who play their mainly "productive" roles sequentially, women play multiple roles (productive, reproductive and household) "simultaneously and must balance simultaneous competing claims on limited time for each of them." Women work mostly without labour-saving technology, or adequate social and extension services. In some countries, women spend nearly three times more time than men on transport activities. The overall result is that women work many hours longer than men in sub-Saharan Africa.
Evidence from Kenya cited in the paper suggests that women may already be more efficient farm managers than men. Other studies from Burkina Faso, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia show that equal access for women to inputs and other resources can boost agricultural productivity and household income. But African women get less than 10 per cent of credit to small farmers and 1 per cent of total credit to agriculture, UNDP estimated in 1995.
The Bank paper says gender factors reveal the weakness of markets and prices as instruments of policy in resource allocation. In a striking passage, the paper observes the "deteriorating economic and welfare indicators, which reflect the stresses" in some sub-Saharan countries undergoing structural adjustment. The "problem of women's invisibility" is particularly significant because with the increasing transfer of costs from the state to the public, women are burdened with an increasing amount of unpaid labour in the household "for reproduction and maintenance of human resources." Ignoring the implications of such changes for unpaid domestic labour implies the assumption that "women's capacity to undertake extra work is infinitely elastic." But the evidence on the ground suggests that "the breaking point has already been reached," the Bank observes. There is "simply not enough female labour time available to maintain the quality and quantity of human resources at its existing level." And in the long run, it warns, falling levels of health, nutrition and education will cause national output to decline.
The idea is not to make more women do more work, the Bank paper says, but to increase their productivity and ease the time pressure and harsh choices that women face. Some policy initiatives, the ECA paper adds, focus on "pro-poor and labour intensive growth," and assume women are an under-utilized resource. But women are more likely to be "over-utilized" and "under-resourced."
One of the conference's most important conclusions was that in order for there to be gender-responsive policy measures and investment, women must take part in policy formulation. And this situation will come about only through the combined efforts of Africa's men and women.
Continental peace-making role for womenThe African Women's Committee on Peace and Development has been set up jointly by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). With a secretariat in Addis Ababa and an initial $100,000 contribution from the OAU Peace Fund, the committee will work closely with the OAU's Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution, Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim announced during the ECA women's conference. At his sides were ECA Executive Secretary K.Y. Amoako, Ugandan Planning Minister Richard Kaijuka and former Liberian head of state Ruth Perry, who is on the committee. The establishment of the committee is the fruit of demands made at various African meetings dating from the Regional Conference on Women, Peace and Development, held in Uganda in 1993, which adopted the Kampala Action Plan. This called for women ministers or plenipotentiaries to be included "at all levels" in OAU mechanisms for conflict prevention, management and resolution, "and in all other policy organs" of the ECA and the OAU. One recent instance of this longstanding push was when the Women's Leadership Forum on Peace, at a meeting in Johannesburg organized by the OAU and ECA in November 1996, urged Mr. Salim to "accelerate the nomination process" of committee members by African countries and NGOs. The result is as follows:
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