The International Women's day is
a day of celebration and a day of challenge, often rolled into one. In
realising how far we have come towards ensuring genuine equality of opportunity
for women as for men, it becomes clear how far we still have to go.
For every iconic female leader – a President Johnson-Sirleaf in
Liberia, for example – there are a thousand female voices in Africa which are unheard. In individual African
countries, and across the continent at large, we see a joust between success
and shortcoming. Africa may lead the world in the proportion of women who
sit in some if its parliaments, but it lags badly behind the rest of the world
in others. Statistics report countries in which three percent of women
have experienced sexual violence – a figure which is three percent too high –
and those in which no less than a thirty-three percent have been confronted and
affronted with such crime.
The mathematics does not make sense, when we see that women are still
among Africa’s most vulnerable people. Fully two-thirds of the
continent’s children out of primary school, its citizens living below the
poverty line, its HIV sufferers, its disenfranchised people, are women.
It is a stark fact that half of Africa’s people bear considerably more than
half of its problems.
Africa’s current and unprecedented economic growth is strong – but it
is flawed if it is not shared, and if it is not environmentally
sustainable. Real growth has to be for women as much as for men, for
younger people as for older, for rural communities as much as urban. And
we know that economic growth alone does not suffice to create gender equality:
it requires political and practical will to drive the gender agenda forward.
The key to that task is law: first establishing the law, and then
implementing it.
On the surface at least, that may be happening. Most African
countries have ratified the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination
Against Women, CEDAW, the various International Labour Organization conventions
on women’s working rights, and the Maputo Protocol of 2005 which was Africa’s
own stated vision of equality for its women.
But legal exceptions are widespread in national constitutions, and in
the statutes governing areas like marital property, inheritance, land, and
labour. Civil law sometimes has to give way to customary law, especially
in rural areas. Many of the legal provisions which discriminate against
women apply to them not simply as women, but as married women. In many
countries, marriage changes the legal status and rights of women, often
conferring legal rights and responsibilities on husbands, and removing them
from wives. Some of Africa’s Family Codes limit women’s capacity to sign
contracts or seek employment without the consent of their husbands.
Everything has its consequences: this limits female farmers’ ability to hold
secure tenure rights to land, thereby diminishing their access to credit and
other goods, which in turn leads to inefficient land use and lower yields and,
as research revealed last year, falls in productivity by up to 40 percent.
The last decade gives just as much evidence of a continent grappling
with a serious issue. The Gambia’s Women’s Act of 2010 brought in
comprehensive legislation to bring about gender equality. It promises the
continued education of young girls who are victims of early marriage and
teenage pregnancy, for instance, and prohibits their expulsion from
school. Kenya’s 2010 Constitution, ‘recognising the aspirations of all
for a government based on the essential values of human rights, equality,
freedom, democracy, social justice and the rule of law’, is suffused with gains
for women, for instance in their being given equal right to inheritance and
unbiased access to land. Article 19 of the Moroccan constitution makes
men and women equal citizens under the law, with the same social, economic,
political, environmental and civil rights. Its title should be a rallying
cry for us all: ‘Honour for women’.
Women’s equality and opportunity before the law is the shared
responsibility of governments and peoples alike. National and
international development organisations, too, must play their role. The
African Development Bank makes loans and grants of tens of millions of dollars
each year, to promote women’s economic empowerment. Where laws establish
gender equality – in the letter, in the spirit and in the practice – we should
give our utmost support.
A message from Donald Kaberuka, President of the AfDB, on the Occasion of International Women’s Day
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