Mixed progress for African women

Review of Beijing conference finds both gains and reverses

By Colleen Lowe Morna

The mid-decade review of the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women found Africa at a precarious crossroads. Thanks largely to the pressure of African women who have become adept at organizing both within and across borders, some important gains have been made on the legal and political front, concluded the review, held in New York in June. Several countries have revised their constitutions to enshrine gender equality. Southern African countries have achieved a higher representation of women in decision-making than in the Americas and Europe. And innovative policy work spreading across the continent -- such as introducing gender considerations into budget debates -- is attracting international interest.

Yet, as revealed by a statistical analysis on the "Status of Women in Africa" launched by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) at the conference, the majority of African women are materially worse off today than they were five years ago. Increasing poverty, unrelenting conflict and the frightening spread of HIV/AIDS -- all of which have a disproportionate impact on women because of their secondary position in society -- are reversing the fragile social and economic gains they had made. The ECA argues that if gender equality had been achieved -- if women were able to participate equally in the economy, had a real say in matters of war and peace and had the power to insist on safe sex -- all three of these scourges would be less serious.

Photo: UN / Ray Witlin

At the conference, known as "Beijing+5," representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as official delegates expressed frustration that while governments are talking the talk of gender equality, they are not yet walking the walk. Speaking at the launch of the "Progress of the World's Women 2000" report of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Uganda's outspoken Vice-President Specioza Kazibwe -- Africa's highest ranking woman politician -- lamented "the omission in the report of the most important indicator of all -- political commitment."

Ms. Kazibwe said she was in office only because of the political commitment to gender equality shown by President Yoweri Museveni. She stirred ripples at the conference by calling for "gender-positive men," whom she defined in an interview as men "who look at things with a gender-oriented eye and make things happen."

Commitments mainly on paper

The head of the ECA's African Centre for Women (ACW), Ms. Josephine Ouédraogo, criticized the conference's format, characterized by formal government statements in the plenary and a bitter wrangle over sexual rights in the corridors and closed-door negotiations. "This should have been an accountability forum," the former minister from Burkina Faso said in an interview. "Heads of state should have come to report and to respond to critical questions from stakeholders and non-governmental organizations."

Photo: UN / Eskinder Debebe

Ms. Ouédraogo maintains that the key reason why gender equality in Africa is still only on paper is that gender structures remain marginal and the same casts of characters (mainly women) come to regional and global conferences. "We are talking to ourselves," she said. "We are still not working in the mainstream -- targeting the ministers of finance, trade, agriculture, the people who make policies critical to the achievement of gender equality."

The preparatory Sixth African Regional Conference on Women convened by the ECA last November broke new ground by accrediting NGOs as full delegates and inviting heads of state and ministers from core ministries. The conference recommended that in future one third of all participants at gender conferences be men.

Some progress in Africa

The analysis of country reports undertaken by the ACW for the preparatory conference shows that there have been some important positive developments, for example:

• Uganda, Seychelles, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Namibia, Morocco, Guinea-Bissau and Madagascar have reviewed their constitutions to make them more gender sensitive. Burkina Faso has repealed a law that prohibits public promotion of contraceptives, while the requirement in Morocco that wives obtain authorization to enter the work force has been repealed. The Kenya Human Rights Task Force has recommended revisions to draft legislation on marriage, divorce, matrimonial property and the rights of children, emphasizing the principle of equality of spouses. Female genital mutilation has been outlawed in Djibouti, Kenya and Ghana.
• NGOs in South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia have launched reviews to examine their country's budgets from a gender perspective. These experiences are being shared globally through an initiative of the Commonwealth Secretariat.
• Heads of state of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have gone beyond global and continental commitments to sign a Declaration on Gender and Development, in which they have undertaken to have 30 per cent of decision-making positions occupied by women by the end of 2000. Three countries, South Africa, Mozambique and Seychelles, already are close to reaching this target. They rank among the top 10 globally in the proportion of women in parliament (only the Scandinavian countries have reached 30 per cent). On average, 18 per cent of parliamentarians in Southern Africa are women, compared with 15 per cent in Europe and the Americas.

But also many shortfalls

However, the country reports also show numerous shortcomings, including:

• Overall, women make up 9 per cent of parliamentarians in Africa, compared with the global average of 13.4 per cent. More needs to be done to increase women's representation and effective participation in other areas, including the judiciary, executive, administration, private sector and even civil society organizations.
• There have been few systematic efforts by African countries to ensure that all provisions of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and other international legal instruments on women's rights are enacted into law. Only two African countries, Senegal and Namibia, have ratified CEDAW's Optional Protocol, which allows women to seek remedy for human rights abuses directly with the UN.
• The existence in most African countries of customary law alongside modern legal systems means that, in reality, the majority of African women remain legal minors all their lives: first under their fathers, then under their husbands and finally under a son or other male guardian.
• Despite the fragile economic gains made by Africa over the last five years, absolute poverty is increasing, especially for women. With a drop in per capita spending on education and the introduction of "user fees," the proportion of girls dropping out of school in Africa is growing, even while their initial enrolment is increasing. About 25 per cent of African women are employed in the informal sector, mainly in small-scale trading. With the loss of formal sector jobs as a result of structural adjustment programmes promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the informal sector has been absorbing increasing numbers of both men and women. Women's lack of access to credit, information and technical advice prevents them from expanding their enterprises. Eighty per cent of the economically active African female labour force is employed in agriculture. Women rarely own land, have access to agricultural extension services or obtain credit. Economic policies heavily emphasize export crops, which are mostly controlled by men. Women lend their labour to these enterprises without reaping the benefits.
• In Africa, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is sweeping through the continent, with a harsh bias against women. Research in West and Central Africa shows that for cultural and economic reasons, women feel unable to refuse sexual advances of partners even when they know that they risk infection. Poverty has pushed increasing numbers of women into sex work, in which HIV infection rates are as high as 20 per cent. Young girls are at great risk due to traditional practices, sexual abuse, forced marriage, prostitution and the myth that infected men can be cured by having sex with a virgin. Women have the added risk of passing on the disease to their unborn babies. Women and girls often have to care for the growing number of AIDS orphans.
• Conflicts affect one-fifth of Africa's 700 million people. These wars have had devastating effects on civilians, especially women and children, who constitute 80 per cent of refugees. They also have experienced a shocking increase in the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

The preparatory Sixth African Regional Conference on Women devised a Regional Action Plan 2000-2004 to accelerate implementation of the 1994 Dakar African Platform for Action and the Beijing Platform for Action. HIV/AIDS, which did not feature in the earlier documents, is highlighted as a priority. The new plan also calls on all African governments to remove reservations to CEDAW and sign the Optional Protocol. Noting that far too much effort has been spent on lobbying and advocacy, and not enough on implementation, the plan emphasizes the importance of monitoring and evaluation, and of developing suitable indicators for doing so.

Weak language and vague targets

African NGOs alleged that disarray and poor caucusing among the official African delegates led to weak language in the "Outcome" document on the priority issues for Africa, especially on HIV/AIDS. They also were critical of the failure of Beijing+5 to come up with more tangible targets and yardsticks than those found in the Beijing Platform for Action.

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Several countries have revised their constitutions to enshrine gender equality. Southern African countries have achieved a higher representation of women in decision-making than in the Americas and Europe.

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African delegations, especially those from SADC, fought hard for more specific language in the document. Namibian delegation head Nentumbo Ndaitwah insisted that all legislation discriminating against women be scrapped by 2005. Some countries objected, so the compromise text reads: "as soon as possible, preferably by 2005."

Other concrete targets set by Beijing+5 endorse those adopted by the Copenhagen Social Summit on closing the gender gap in primary and secondary education by 2005 and ensuring free, compulsory and universal primary education for girls and boys by 2015.

Overall, Ms. Ouédraogo says that the "Outcome" document adopted at Beijing+5 is a valuable tool. "Every African country," she says, "can find itself somewhere in the document. What is important now is to take this document home and translate it into meaningful measures at a country level." As an immediate follow-up to the conference, she said the ECA is designing mechanisms to monitor implementation of all the commitments African governments have made to advance gender equality.

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