Women informal cross-border traders negotiate a minefield ranging from bus drivers, customs officials and dangerous and unfamiliar environments. Credit: IPS

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 (IPS/TerraViva) Whenever gender empowerment is a vibrant topic of discussion internationally, some of the countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America are invariably singled out for their success stories in politics, education, health care or civil liberties even as Africa is mostly left out of political reckoning – and wrongly so.

Rwanda has provided global leadership in terms of women holding elected office, with more than half of all its parliamentary seats filled by women, says Litha Musyimi-Ogana, director of women, gender and development directorate at the 53-member African Union (AU), the largest single coalition of African nations.

Cape Verde, another African high achiever, has “had the highest level of cabinet ministers in the world:” at last count, about 12 out of 17.

But still, Musyimi-Ogana points out, the AU is aware that although 70 percent of its members have gender policies, there are “huge implementation challenges”.

The reason why most of these policies are not implemented is primarily lack of financial resources.

As a result, the AU has set up an African Women’s Development Fund to tide over “resource constraints”.

At the same time, it has also established a protocol – an addendum on the ‘Rights of Women’ ratified by 27 countries – to the existing African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

Lalla Ben Barka, deputy executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), claims Africa has made “impressive gains” in closing the gender gap in primary education, largely due “to free, universal, compulsory education” – continent-wide.

She told the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which concludes a two-week session Friday, that 65 percent of the region’s countries were conducting research on the situation of girls, and some countries had revised school curricula to present positive images of women.

Still, there were gaps in several areas: inheritance rights for women, higher education and the elimination of cultural practices and barriers to women’s advancement.

She said Liberia has had the distinction of having elected the first female African president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took office in January 2006.

Ben Barka also said that 47 percent of countries had enacted laws to combat female genital mutilation (FGM), and many offered comprehensive services for victims.

According to Tsegga Gaim Misgun of the National Union of Eritrean Women, efforts to abolish FGM began as far back as the late 1970s  – even before the formal independence of Eritrea in 1993 – by the then de facto government, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.

As a result of these efforts, the people of Eritrea had initiated community laws banning FGM. On the basis of these initiatives, the government of Eritrea banned the practice in March 2007.

“The proclamation made female genital mutilation a criminal offence,” Misgun said.

Noluthando Mayende-Sibiya, South Africa’s minister for women, children and persons with disabilities, told delegates that although violence against women and girls remains a “major concern of government”, the country is in an advanced stage of developing a comprehensive framework to address gender violence.

These include, among others, legislation on sexual offences; trafficking in persons; domestic violence; and the children’s act.

The Thuthuzela Care Centre, described as a comprehensive one-stop service centre for victims of domestic violence, was hailed as an example of “best practice” in the 2007 report by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on violence against children.

“These are replicated and piloted in some countries at the global level,” she said.

Mayende-Sibiya also said that South Africa was proud of the high number of women deployed in peacekeeping missions, averaging about 40 percent of peacekeepers from her country.

Alphonsine Mbie N’na, Gabon’s minister of health and social affairs, said her country had created a poverty reduction strategy as well as an exam to promote socio-economic activities among women, with winners receiving 40,000 dollars and an overseas trip.

 In the field of employment, Gabon has no hiring or salary discrimination. Schooling and text books were free.

In Ethiopia, the ministry of women’s affairs was an integral part of the executive branch of the government.

And to boost gender equality in agriculture – the country’s main economic sector – Ethiopia registers names of spouses for land certification in order to ensure that women can own their economic assets.

Maria Suarez (center) after being presented with an award for her activism.

Credit: Stop the Traffik website

By Chryso D’Angelo

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 (IPS/TerraViva) — Maria Suarez was 15 years old when she crossed the Mexican border and entered the U.S. legally to live with her sister in the states. A few months later, she was a slave.

“A man bought me for 200 dollars,” Maria told TerraViva. She was lured to his house by a woman promising work. “He told me that if I ever tried to leave, he’d kill my family. He said he knew witchcraft, then he cut my long hair and made dolls and put them around the house and in the cemetery. He said the only way I would get out was dead…and I believed him.”

After enduring five years of rape, torture, and emotional turmoil, Maria’s captor was killed by a neighbour, but she was arrested for the crime and sentenced to 25 years to life. 

There is no way of knowing exactly how many people like Maria are bought and sold on the black market. According to Soroptimist International, A Global Voice for Women, the numbers are estimated to be between 12.3 and 27 million.

However, representatives of the group sent a message of hope on Monday at a conference titled “Stop Trafficking – 44……Action, Advocacy and Progress Around the World Through Local and Global Efforts” during the 54th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, which runs from Mar. 1 to 12.

One sizeable triumph against human trafficking is the improvement of legislation, according to Leigh Ellwood-Brown, president of Soroptimist International for the Federation of the South West Pacific.

The number of countries that have implemented the U.N. Protocol Against Trafficking in Persons has doubled over the last few years, according to the United Nations Global Report on Human Trafficking, 2009. The number of convictions against traffickers has also risen.

“Those countries that have implemented the appropriate legislation are moving the trafficking and Commercial Sex Industry (CSI) out of their borders,” Ellwood-Brown told TerraViva.

Maria Suarez agrees that law enforcement has come a long way since her capture in 1976. The 50-year-old was freed in 2004 after her case was reopened and she was acquitted in a new trial. Today, she speaks to groups throughout California that include victims of trafficking, police, fire officials, and district attorneys in an effort to educate.

Ellwood-Brown stresses the importance of women sharing their stories, as long as they feel safe to speak out. She referred to the success of a Soroptimist programme in Thailand during which former slaves returned to their villages to talk to men and women about the harsh realities of human trafficking.

“The presence of these women in the villages sent a powerful message because there was a visual – a real, human story about what traffickers do to women – to that woman standing right there,” Ellwood-Brown told TerraViva.

But, there is still a long road ahead. Ellwood-Brown noted the growing organised crime network run by both male and female traffickers, which are becoming even more deceptive.

“If a victim of trafficking is offered ‘release’, it is usually on condition to go home to their town/village and recruit a specific number of new members,” she said. “They usually have blackmailed them with the security & lives of their families.”

Norma Ramos, Esq., executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, added that many programmes strive to generate income for women by teaching them a craft or skill so they can avoid prostitution to survive, but it’s not enough to fix the problem.

“Ending poverty helps, but there will always be a demand and there will always be greed,” she said. “So as long as that triangle exists, there will be trafficking.” Ramos called for more people to come forward and speak out.

Maria Suarez is answering that call – and taking it seriously. “My dream is to make videos in different languages and go to villages where people don’t know about human trafficking,” she says. “I want to do something productive for people who are in the same shoes I was in thirty years ago when all my goals and dreams as a teenager were taken away. I want girls to have a good life and not be like me. The only way I can keep living is to keep working and educating others to make sure this ends.”

Liberia’s new farmers like Jeanet Gay do not have husbands to support them and their children. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Christian Benoni

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 (IPS/TerraViva) The African Union’s declaration that 2010/2020 is the African Women’s decade will mean little if governments fail to ratify and implement the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women.

Delegates at the Beijing +15 meeting in New York say implementation of the protocol, popularly known as the African women’s protocol, holds the key to advancing the rights of women on the continent. So far, only 27 countries, half of the continent’s nations, have ratified the instrument, regarded as progressive in safeguarding women’s rights.

The protocol, which came into force in 2005, requires state parties to eliminate sexual violence, discrimination and other harmful practices against women, and ensure gender equality and reproductive health rights, as well as the right to inherit property. While some countries have ratified the protocol, lack of implementation has seen continued human rights violations against women.

“The rights to cultivate and transfer customary land in Malawi are still granted by traditional chiefs who do not allow women to own land,” says Luciana Kuboma, a smallholder farmer in the southern African country.

“Women are in the process left poor and cannot even access credit at microfinance institutions because they have nothing to present as collateral,” she adds.

In most parts of Africa, women lose land or matrimonial property to in-laws upon the death of their husbands. Many become destitute because they are unable to use the land to feed their children.

Addressing such traditional practices calls not only for implementing the protocol, but urgent budgets to support the implementation.

“We must now move from rhetoric to action. Our governments must put money into awareness-creation programmes, and building partnerships with religious and cultural institutions so as to change their attitudes towards such practices,” says Elizabeth Musoke of Maarifa Community Women’s Group, based in Nairobi.

Training is also crucial for police and magistrates who handle rape and other sexual violence cases. According to Tina Musuya, executive director of the Centre for Domestic Violence Prevention in Uganda, negative attitudes and blame towards survivors of sexual violence discourage them from reporting crimes.

“We have unsupportive law enforcement officers who mock rape, blaming women for having been scantily dressed at the time of the rape occurred. Also, magistrates reduce jail sentences on rape on pretext that if the head of the house is in jail, the family will have no provider,” she notes.

The situation is similar in neighbouring Kenya, where despite the Sexual Offences Act stipulating a minimum sentence of 10 years imprisonment and a maximum of life imprisonment, offenders are sometimes released after a few months, making the law far less effective as a deterrent.

Kenya is among the countries that have signed but not yet ratified the African women’s protocol. The heat is on now for such countries to “put their money where their mouth is” to ensure women enjoy their human rights, says Musuya.

African women attending the Commission on the Status of Women chat in the lobby of U.N. headquarters. Credit: Bomoon Lee/TerraViva

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 (IPS/TerraViva) – The negative fallout from climate change is having a devastatingly lopsided impact on women compared to men, from higher death rates during natural disasters to heavier household and care burdens.

In the 1991 cyclone disasters that killed 140,000 in Bangladesh, 90 percent of victims were reportedly women; in the 2004 Asian Tsunami, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of overall deaths were women.

And following the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States, African-American women, who were the poorest population in some of the affected States in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, faced the greatest obstacles to survival, according to the New York-based Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO).

The 2007 Human Development Report, issued by the U.N. Development Programme, points out that women are particularly affected by climate change because they are the largest percentage – accounting for about 70 percent – of the poor population.

Amy North, a researcher working on gender, education and global poverty reduction initiatives at the Institute of Education in the University of London, told IPS climate change is also exacerbating existing gender inequalities, with a devastating effect on the quality of life of poor women and girls.

In many parts of the world, women and girls are responsible for collecting water and firewood.

As these resources become scarcer in the face of increasingly erratic rainfall, they must spend more time looking for and collecting them, further reducing the time they have available to engaging in economic activities, or attending school, she said.

Women are also the main producers of food, providing 70 percent of agricultural labour in sub-Saharan Africa, and so are particularly affected by reduced agricultural output, North added.

“The care responsibilities that fall to women and girls mean that health problems associated with climate change – including an increase in waterborne diseases associated with flooding – often result in them taking on an increased burden of care as they are required to look after sick family members,” she noted.

June Zeitlin, a former executive director of WEDO, has cited a study by the London School of Economics analysing disasters in 141 countries that provides decisive evidence that gender differences in deaths from natural disasters are directly linked to women’s economic and social rights.

That is, gender inequalities are magnified in disaster situations. So when women lack basic rights, more women than men will die from natural disasters.

The study also found the opposite to be true: in societies where women and men enjoy equal rights, natural disasters kill the same number of women and men.

In an interview with IPS, North said that in East Africa – a region that is acutely feeling the effects of climate change, with widespread drought resulting in critical shortages of food and water – research suggests that increased poverty levels is having serious consequences for the education of girls.

In Kenya, participants in the Gender, Education and Global Poverty Reduction Initiatives project have noted that increased poverty associated with drought has affected school attendance, with girls being more likely to be withdrawn from school than boys.

In neighbouring Uganda, the food crises associated with climate change have been linked to higher rates of early marriage for girls, as they are exchanged for dowry or bride price.

These “famine marriages” – as they are called – not only lead to girls dropping out of school, but also make them vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections and related reproductive complications.

WEDO’s Cate Owren told IPS her organisation is also deeply concerned about the political status of negotiations on climate change.

“We do not support the Copenhagen Accord (finalised last December) serving as the basis for ongoing negotiations this year,” she said.

But still, she said, “We are celebrating (and maintaining momentum from) great strides being made over the course of the last few years, during which time gender equality issues were substantively integrated into climate change negotiations.”

According to WEDO, not only did gender texts increase (peaking at 40 plus) in negotiating documents, but so did women’s participation.

At the Copenhagen talks, women comprised about 30 percent of registered country delegates, the largest percentage of women attending a climate change meeting on record.

Stefan Wallin, Finland’s minister of culture and sport, told delegates last week that one of his country’s “strong areas of emphasis” concerns decision-making processes on matters affecting climate change.

“Finland has taken an active role in ensuring that climate change decision-making is inclusive, both of women and men,” Wallin said.

He said climate change does not affect women and men in the same way. “It has gender-differentiated impact,” he noted.

Finland, he said, has argued that climate targets are reachable only “if the knowledge and views of both women and men are included, and if both women and men are committed to the goals.”

Asked how women could be protected from the after-effects of climate change, North said there are a number of important steps that must be taken.

Women’s groups mobilised around the climate talks in Copenhagen last year to demand that a gender perspective be integrated into the Copenhagen outcomes and follow-up activities.

“It is essential that these demands are taken seriously and that all future agreements around climate change recognise the differential impacts that climate change has on men and women,” North said.

For this to happen, she said, women’s participation must be ensured in the negotiation of policies and strategies to tackle the effects of climate change at international and national levels.

And as individual governments draw up National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) to outline their priorities for adapting to the effects of climate change, it is crucial that these take into consideration the particular effects of climate change on women and girls.

Moreover, serious attention must also be given to addressing the underlying gender inequalities that make women more vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the first place.

This includes taking action to ensure women are able to participate in decision making and political processes that affect them; tackling the inequalities that women face in accessing employment and childcare; and making concerted efforts to ensure real progress is made towards achieving gender equality in education.

North said this will be a key feature of discussions that will be taking place at the E4 (Engendering Empowerment: Education and Equality) conference in Dakar, Senegal in May this year, and in e-discussions that will be held from Apr. 12 to May 17 (http://www.e4conference.org/.)

Georg Kell, executive director of the UN Global Compact, speaks about the launch of the Women's Empowerment Principles. Credit: Bomoon Lee/TerraViva

By Sabina Zaccaro

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 (IPS/TerraViva) Companies with women in leadership positions are reporting a measurable boost to their bottom lines, but they are still a minority in the world’s business community.

To rectify this imbalance, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the U.N. Global Compact (UNGC) have designed specific guidelines to encourage the business community to appoint more women as managers, executives and board members.

“The full participation of women benefits business and, indeed, all of us,” Georg Kell, executive director of the U.N. Global Compact, told TerraViva.

The call for action is part of the Women’s Empowerment Principles – Equality Means Business, seven steps companies can take to empower women in the workplace and address the vast under-representation of women in top positions and on boards.

Principle number one urges company executives to make gender equality a top priority.

The seven principles are informed by leading businesses’ policies and practices from different sectors and around the world, Kell said, and offer a practical approach to advance women. He said the UNGC objective is to integrate these principles into companies’ own corporate social responsibility programmes.

A recent survey by the consultancy firm McKinsey reports that one-third of 2,300 monitored companies said their investments in women had already resulted in greater profits, while another third said their investments would soon show profit.

“The multiplier effect of women’s empowerment has been increasingly acknowledged,” said Inés Alberdi, UNIFEM’s executive director. “What is powerful and new today is that the corporate community itself reports that gender equality is good for business — advancing innovation, attracting top talent, raising positive consumer and community recognition and improving profits.”

Copel is a power utility in southern Brazil that generates and delivers accessible electricity to the entire population of the state of Paraná – more than three million connected households. Its total workforce is around 8,000 direct workers and 5,000 outsourced employees.

“We signed the Global Compact in 2001 and since then we have been trying hard to understand and incorporate its principles, as the corporate pace allows us to,” said Susie C. Pontarolli of the Environment and Corporate Citizenship Division at Copel.

The division she works for is also run by a woman, Marlene Zannin, the only woman appointed to a leadership position since the company was founded in 1954.

“Having a woman as Director of Environment and Corporate Citizenship speaks a lot and loud about how much progress has been made in our corporate culture since we committed to the Global Compact,” Pontarolli said.

“This is something we could have never dreamed of back in 1999, when we got started with the first steps towards corporate social responsibility,” she added.

The women’s empowerment principles were developed over a one-year international consultation process to help companies tailor existing policies and practices to advance women’s empowerment and inclusion.

They also address factors that have an indirect impact on businesses, like violence against women in the workplace. Principle three, in fact, includes establishing a zero-tolerance policy towards all forms of violence at work and training security staff and managers to recognise signs of violence against women.

The complete list of Principles can be found here: http://www.unifem.org/attachments/stories/WomensEmpowermentPrinciples.pdf

High-level discussion about the situation of women at the UN. Credit:BomoonLee/IPS

By Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9, 2010 (IPS) – “What do I get from them? Nothing but bullsh*t,” says Nupur Acharya, reflecting about how she is treated by her husband and two grown sons on daily basis. Continue Reading

Breaking the Silence: Sexual Violence in Cambodia/AI Report

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Mar 9, 2010 (IPS) – Cambodia’s new penal code, which comes into force later this year, should be accompanied by stronger law enforcement measures if the country’s women and girls are to be better protected from rape, says the global rights lobby Amnesty International (AI). Continue Reading

Children in the coastal town of Kalmunai. Credit:Amantha Perera/IPS

By Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Mar 9, 2010 (IPS) – As a wife of a rice farmer and mother of two children aged nine and two, Sanjeevani Bandara’s days are packed with chores. Yet while she used to be able to keep up with all she has to do in a day, this Sri Lankan mother now finds herself struggling to accomplish even the most basic tasks. Continue Reading

Credit: Bomoon Lee/IPS TerraViva

By Armin Rosen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 8 (IPS/TerraViva) On Monday, the Commission on the Status of Women took a two-hour break from the Secretariat Building’s main conference room while the Iranian, Syrian, Nigerian, Qatari and Saint Lucian delegations used the cavernous meeting hall for a parallel event on “Recognising the Critical Role of Mothers in Society” – an event that has turned out to be one of the more controversial meetings related to the two-week-long Commission.

The conference room was packed with Commission participants who had come to hear speeches from activists and government officials on the importance of motherhood and “traditional” family structures in social and economic development.

The event was put together with the coordination of Family Watch International, an NGO that aims to “preserve and promote the family, traditional marriage, life, parental rights and religious freedom.”

The event was organised when Family Watch International began contacting various U.N. delegations about cosponsoring a parallel event during CSW on the social and economic importance of traditional family structures in general and motherhood in particular.

According to FWI president Sharon Slater, the Syrians and Iranians were receptive to her group’s message. “They thought it was time for the issue of motherhood to be put on the U.N.’s agenda,” she said.

Slater added that her group was not concerned about co-sponsoring an event with the Iranian government. “We’re a non-denominational, nonpolitical group,” she said. “We’ll partner with anyone who believes in the value of family.”

Saint Lucia’s Permanent Mission to the U.N. had a similar attitude towards collaborating with the Iranian government on a CSW side-event. Sarah Flood-Beaubrun, a former health minister and member of Parliament in Saint Lucia, and a member of the island nation’s U.N. delegation, even wondered why anyone would be interested in whether Saint Lucia had any reservations about co-sponsoring an event with Iran.

“I’m not sure why you’re asking that question,” she said. “I would have thought that the subject matter would have been most important. We never agree on everything,” she said of the U.N.’s member states, “but where there is an opportunity to collaborate we wish to do that. This is the U.N. This is where nations do that.”

At the panel, Beaubrun spoke about the importance of family in a Caribbean context, and said that family values could help reign in the region’s seemingly out-of-control murder rates.

But a few activists believe that the event is fraught with irony – both because of Iran’s co-sponsorship and because of Family Watch International’s conservative stance on social issues, which some perceive as being detrimental to women’s interests.

For instance, during the panel, Slater was unsparing in her group’s views on family planning and reproductive rights, two things that most mainstream women’s organisations support. She criticised family planning programmes in the developing world for failing to reduce maternal mortality rates.

“Why do we keep calling on the world to implement more family planning programmes,” she asked, “if the maternal morality programmes in these countries has not been reduced?”

Meanwhile, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission has characterised FWI as an “anti-gay organisation.” FWI is also a “signatory organisation” with Positive Alternatives to Homosexuality, a “non-profit coalition of organisations that help people with unwanted same-sex attractions.”

The Iranian government is notoriously hostile towards sexual minorities: homosexuality is still punishable by death in the Islamic Republic, while international rights watchdogs routinely issue statements critical of the government’s treatment of homosexuals.

For instance, this past November, Human Rights Watch issued an appeal on behalf of three Iranian men sentenced to death for homosexual acts they committed while they were teenagers.

The Islamic Republic has a similar record on gender issues. “It is profoundly ironic that a regime that practices gender apartheid on a regular basis and that allows marriage at the age of nine would sponsor an event ostensibly about women’s rights,” says Kenneth Timmerman of the Maryland-based Foundation for Democracy in Iran.

Human Rights Watch also issued a Mar. 6 statement urging Iran to “stop undermining women’s rights”, reporting that the Islamic Republic was on the verge of legalising polygamy – a practice likely out of keeping with FWI’s endorsement of traditional, monogamous family structures.

Despite the Iranian government’s attempts to use CSW to bolster its reputation on women’s issues, Iranian women have succeeded in making themselves heard this week.

Last Thursday and Friday, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran held side events with Iranian women who are not a part of any official Iranian government delegation. According to a Campaign representative, they shared their experiences as women living in the Islamic Republic during the protests and crackdowns of this past year.

Representatives from more left-wing women’s groups simply avoided Iran and FWI’s hour in the CSW’s main venue.

Nathalie Margi of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership did not attend the event, but said it was actually a disturbing reminder of what many of the NGOs at CSW are up against.

“There’s a backlash against the women’s movement and the LGBT movement,” she said when asked about FWI’s presence at the Commission.

“These groups come to these spaces as women’s NGOs,” she said of the conference’s more traditionally minded NGO participants. “We’re celebrating 15 years since the Beijing Conference, but they want to scale back on reproductive rights victories and LGBT victories.”

Women protest against the suppression of their rights. Credit:Evelyn Matsamura Kiapi/IPS

By Evelyn Matsamura Kiapi

KAMPALA, Mar 8, 2010 (IPS) – ‘Equal rights; equal opportunities’ may be the theme for this year’s International Women’s Day, but while women around the world celebrate, a group of Ugandan women are protesting against the suppression of their rights. Continue Reading