Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury. Credit: UN Photo

By  Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury *

New York, March 8 —  Exactly to the date, 10 years ago, on the International Women’s Day, on behalf of the UN  Security Council as its President, I had the honor to  issue a statement that brought to global attention the unrecognized, under-utilized and under-valued  contribution women can make to preventing war, to  building peace and to engaging individuals and  societies live in harmony.

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Banana vendor in Nairobi: creating - and funding - adaptation strategies to protect food security is an urgent priority for Africa. Credit: Julius Mwelu/IRIN

By Christian Benoni

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS/TerraViva) Any strategies to ensure food security must address women’s access and right to land ownership, stress experts and activists meeting on the sidelines of the CSW in New York.

“Women cannot be net food producers and yet they lack land rights,” said Augustine Mahiga, the permanent representative of Tanzania to the United Nations.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says women produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food in most developing countries, yet they lack control of land.

New research on food insecurity in Africa shared at the CSW indicates that while women are the mainstay of small-scale agriculture, from wage labour to day-to-day family subsistence farming, they have more difficulties accessing resources such as land and credit, as well as productivity-enhancing inputs and services.

The research involved nine countries in southern, eastern and western Africa and was commissioned by the Hairou Commission, which supports the advocacy work of grassroots women.

“The government should come up with an initiative to ensure that women are given loans to buy land. It has been a tradition that the issues of land are a preserve of men, [but] women can do a lot more if given the same opportunities like men,” says one of the respondents from Kakamega, western Kenya, who is quoted in the report.

Similarly, in Gambia, land is communal, and men determine who uses the land and how, according to Isatou Njie-Saidy, the women’s affairs minister. However, the government has now embarked on a subsidy programme to provide fertiliser and seeds to smallholder farmers, mostly women, to increase food production, according to Saidy.

The same subsidy programme has helped the Malawian government transform its agricultural sector by providing subsidised hybrid maize seeds and fertilisers to farmers. It has since moved from having a serious food deficit to becoming a net maize exporter.

“We are happy because the programme has empowered most women to produce sufficient food for the family, and for sale,” said Luciana Kuboma, a Malawian farmer.

However, erratic weather patterns have made farming difficult, with prolonged drought contributing to massive crop failures. The priority now is for governments to invest in irrigation systems.

“We need our governments to put money into irrigation where women can be able to farm throughout the year. The current weather patterns have shown that we cannot continue to depend on rain-fed agriculture,” said Violet Shivutse of Groots Kenya, a grassroots women organisation in Kenya.

The country is still far from harnessing its full irrigation potential. There are plans to increase the land under irrigation from the current 120,000 hectares to 400,000 hectares, with a long-term vision to achieve the full potential of 1.3 million hectares.

According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, African countries “produce 38 percent of their crops from about seven percent of their cultivated land, on which water is managed.” This means that more investment in irrigation would see greater returns in terms of food security, and end the cycle of food crises in the continent.

In the face of widespread poverty, South Africa is increasing social grants, which will benefit about 2.4 million more South African children. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Chryso D’Angelo

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS/TerraViva) Fifteen years after the landmark Beijing Declaration on women’s rights, the gender gap is not narrowing in most developing countries, according to the “Gender Equity Index (GEI) 2009, Beijing and Beyond: Putting Gender Economics at the Forefront.”

Presented during the 54th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, which concludes Friday, the report revealed which countries have an improved rate of equity (Rwanda topped the charts) and which rank among the worst (Yemen and Cóte D’Ivoire).

“All around the world the women’s movement has expressed its disappointment with the fact that states are very quick to sign onto human rights instruments and endorse different policies at the international and regional levels, but extremely slow in delivering on their commitments and implementing legislation,” according to the report, compiled by the NGO Social Watch.

A devastating highlight of the findings is that the global financial crisis has virtually wiped out the economic gains that have been made by women over the last few years.

“We’re seeing a regression in all of our indicator categories (economics, education, and empowerment),” Natalia Cardona, Social Watch’s advocacy coordinator, told TerraViva. “Every time there is a crisis, the developing world is hit very hard.”

As a result, countries are turning to loans from the IMF and the World Bank in large doses, but many are voicing concerns over the past failings of these structural adjustment policies.

“Most of them who left the IMF and the World Bank are saying that the policies are wrong, but who is being held accountable? They are washing their hands,” said speaker Emily Sikazwe, executive director of Women for Change of Zambia. “It’s left to our countries to clean up the mess – in education and so many other areas.”

According to Cardona, the loans are a double-edge sword because they stipulate that countries cut public entities in order to balance budgets. In the end, women pay a high price, and the equity gap closes further.

“Education and healthcare are women-friendly industries,” Cardona told TerraViva. “They employ teachers and nurses, whom are usually female.” With programmes cut, women are unemployed and girls are uneducated, continuing the cycle.

In addition, women are depended upon to step in where healthcare has been cut. They must take care of the children and elderly, inhibiting them from finding paid employment.

Finally, a side effect of economic turmoil is systemic violence, which Cardona fears will put women in increased jeopardy.

“For next year, we’re predicting that the economic gain women had will be completely wiped out,” Cardona told TerraViva. “We’ll see a total regression of the progress for women.”

Lesotho's Gender Minister Mathabiso Lepono. Credit: Bomoon Lee/TerraViva

By Christian Benoni

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS/TerraViva) Female migrant workers play a critical role in promoting development in their home countries, but continue to face discrimination in host nations, even ones that have policies on the books designed to protect them.

“Most of the immigrant workers are undocumented and when they seek basic services like health care, they are met with negative attitudes from health staff. Some may easily die,” Bijaya Rai Shrestha, a returned migrant from Nepal, told TerraViva.

“There are women who are forced to do sex work, subjecting them to the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. It is even hard for them if they have to seek treatment,” she said.

Similar sentiments were echoed by Marieta de Vos, director of the MOSAIC Training, Service and Healing Centre for Women, whose organisation runs a small clinic in Cape Town, South Africa that has been offering services to migrant women. She sees at least 50 in a month.

“We get women who need contraceptives, ARVs or pap smears. They don’t get them at all at public facilities because they are met with negative attitudes from health workers who are already overburdened,” she observed, adding that many health workers do not have the patience to deal with migrants who cannot speak English.

In addition, there are increased cases of gender forms of racism and xenophobia against women migrant workers in South Africa, a country that, according to Vos, has a policy that bans discrimination, and guarantees protection and security of migrants.

A recent International Organisation for Migration survey conducted in the country supports this. The study, ‘Towards Tolerance, Law and Dignity: Addressing Violence Against Foreign Nationals in South Africa’, also indicates that while foreign nationals remain subject to xenophobic violence, women are the most vulnerable group.

Emphasis at the CSW meeting has been on getting governments to adhere to the United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. The international agreement, which came to force in 2003, also stresses the importance of migrants’ remittances in reducing poverty in their home countries.

U.N. studies indicate that migrant women workers contribute to the development of both sending and receiving countries – remittances from their incomes account for as much as 10 percent of the GDP in some countries.

For example, Lesotho, one of the most migration-dependant countries in the world, has over 240,000 people outside the country, most of them women, according to the gender minister, Mathabiso Lepono.

“When the women are not working as farm or domestic workers in South Africa, where they have migrated in large numbers, they are engaged in other activities like hawking or sewing, to earn more money to fight poverty in their families back home,” she said.

In many countries like Lesotho, remittances from migrant women are used to buy food, and pay for schooling and medical care, but there is also a need to help women learn to save and invest their earnings.

A U.N. study launched at the CSW, ‘Migration, Remittances and Gender-Responsive Local Government’, highlights the need for migrant women to ensure sustainability of their remittances through investment. It calls on governments to ensure protection of women migrant workers, and to provide policies that “link remittances with sustainable livelihoods”, at the same time building social capital.

Credit: IPS TerraViva

By Ann Hellman

With the 15th-year review of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women taking place at the ongoing Commission on the Status of Women in New York, South African teachers and education experts say they fear that a special focus on the advancement of girls is getting lost amidst the growing levels of poverty in the country. Continue Reading

Credit: IPS TerraViva

By Selina Rust

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 11 (IPS/TerraViva)- Whenever Yusriya saw her neighbours leaving for school, she would cry.

“I wanted to read signs, understand ads, read the news and even write my name,” she explained.

The 13-year-old girl lives in Abu Teeg, an Egyptian city that hasn’t changed much over the years: the vast majority of women are uneducated, focus on the needs of their families, and even require their husband’s permission to leave the house. Continue Reading

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/.)