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.

The members of the Security  Council recognized that peace is inextricably linked  with equality between women and men and affirmed the  equal access and full participation of women in power  structures and their full involvement in all efforts  for peace and security.

It is unfortunate that the  intrinsic role of women in global peace and security  had remained unrecognized since the creation of the  United Nations.
For a long time, there has been  an impression of women as helpless victims
of wars and  conflicts.

The role of women in  fostering peace in their communities and beyond has
often been overlooked. The inexplicable silence of 55  long years was
broken, for the first time, on the 8th  of March 2000. Thereby, the seed for the
Security  Council resolution 1325 was sown.

If one looks  into the relevance of contents, potential for change  and
expected impact of any global declaration for  women, two stand out head and
shoulder above all  others.

The Beijing Platform for  Action and 1325 are unparalleled in terms of what
they  can do to empower women, not only to give 50% of  world’s population
their due but also to make the  world a better place to live. But where do
we stand in  terms of there implementation?

Adoption of  1325 opened a much-awaited door of opportunity for  women who
have shown time and again that they bring a  qualitative improvement in
structuring peace and in  post-conflict architecture. One shining example of
this has been the Mano River Women’s Peace Network  that brings together women
from the West African  nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra  Leone.

What then can we do in the coming months  and years to move forward an
effective implementation  of 1325 in letter and spirit?  The main question  is
not to make war safe for women but to structure the  peace in a way that
there is no recurrence of war and  conflict.

That is why women need to  be at the peace tables, women need to be
involved in  the decision-making and in the peace-keeping teams,  particularly as
civilians to ensure real and faithful  implementation of 1325.

The time has come to  prepare an exhaustive and comprehensive list of
indicators to monitor and measure progress in the  implementation of 1325 in its
letter and spirit.   Included in that should be the statement by the
Security Council on 8 March 2000 as that laid the  foundation of the resolution.

The Security  Council resolution 1889 adopted on 5 October 2009  asked the
Secretary-General to submit to the Council  within 6 months a set of
indicators for use at the  global level to track implementation of 1325, which
could serve as a common basis for reporting by  relevant United Nations
entities, other international  and regional organizations, and Member States in
2010  and beyond.

What is the Secretary-General’s  role in all these? Not to speak of the
need for his  genuinely active, dedicated engagement in using the  moral
authority of the United Nations and the high  office he occupies for the effective
implementation of  1325, even his pronouncements have referred to this
landmark resolution in a cursory and non-substantive  manner.

On this year’s International Women’s  Day, which his office curiously
pushed on the CSW 54  to be observed on 3 March, Secretary-General Ban  Ki-moon
devoted one lonely sentence to 1325 in his  rather long oration claiming that
he has  ”made  women’s empowerment a priority”.

On the 2008 and 2009  International Women’s Day, he used his good judgment
not to say anything at all on 1325. 2007 was different  that being his
first year and policy direction was not  in place early in March.

Even worse, since  taking over, Ban has met hundreds of heads of
state/government, kings, emirs at the UN and  throughout the world, but in his
talking points with  them there has been no place for 1325 and its
implementation.

Would it not have strong,  positive impact on countries for the
implementation of  1325 if their leaders received a formal communication  from Ban
urging them compliance with the Security  Council resolution?

So far only 17 countries  have submitted their national implantation plans.
Why  does not the Secretary-General write to member-states  suggesting a
date for submission of these  plans?

Another area that deserves special  attention is the need for the
awareness, sensitivity  and training of the senior officials within the United
Nations system as a whole with regard to 1325.   At the same time, it would be an
eye-opener to know  what kind of instructions have been sent to the UN
Resident Coordinators who represent the SG and the  whole UN system at the
country level.

A matter  of urgent attention is that in the name of  peacekeeping, the
abuses which have been ignored,  tolerated and left unpunished for years by the
U.N.  cannot be acceptable in a civilized international  community. Out of
450 cases of abuse, only 29 have  been acted upon during 2007-2009.

The U.N.  leadership hides behind the position that it is the  sovereign
right of member-states to try their  peacekeepers. If the U.N. through its
tribunals, and  through the International Criminal Court, (ICC) can  put former
or sitting heads of state on trial, then  why not peacekeepers? The SRSG in
charge of each of  the 18 peacekeeping missions should be accountable for
sexual violence and abuse committed by any peacekeeper  in his/her
jurisdiction.

Also, critical here  is the role and contribution of civil society. At the
global level, the UN secretariat should not only make  it a point to
consult it, but at the same time, such  consultations should be open and
transparent.

During the 10th anniversary  ministerial meeting of the Security Council in
October, civil society should have seat at the Council  table. These days
one rarely hears about the Arria  formula meetings of the Council with NGOs.

An  experts group has been set up by Ban a few days ago  and it was handed
a tall agenda. For sure, the group’s  final report would not be out before
this October.  Conventional wisdom at the UN says that when the SG  wants to
skirt any responsibility, he calls an experts  group. Group’s co-chair Mary
Robinson said “We will be  consulting with civil society organizations
around the  world …” Civil society will wait for that  invitation, one hopes at
the first meeting of the  experts group in New York.

We should not  forget that when civil society is marginalized, there  is
little chance for 1325 to get implemented in the  real  sense.

* Former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the  UN

Opening of the 54th Commission on the Status of Women. Credit: Bomoon Lee/TerraViva

By Thalif Deen and Anna Shen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS/TerraViva) – When a two-week meeting on gender empowerment concluded at U.N. headquarters Friday, there were several lingering questions crying out for answers.

Were there any commitments to protect the universality of women’s rights, including sexual and reproductive rights?

Was there any significant progress on the proposal to set up a separate U.N. agency – officially called a gender entity – for women?

And were there any indications of increased funding for gender-related issues, including resources to battle sexual violence?

The answers were mostly in the realm of political uncertainty, as the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) assessed the state of women’s rights, 15 years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing approved a wide-ranging plan of action on gender empowerment.

Naisola Likimani of the pan-African Femnet, an advocacy organisation, said she was emotionally exhausted from two weeks of nonstop meetings.

However, she said, it was good to see that certain issues were now understood – such as human trafficking, which was no longer seen as an emerging issue. It was now part of a global space that required attention.

She was pleased the new gender entity had acquired broad support amongst governments, civil societies and U.N. agencies but expressed disappointment that the process seemed to be stalled.

“There is foot-dragging and nitpicking about politics. What is frustrating is that something so important for resourcing women’s rights is being treated like a political issue at the U.N.,” she said.

“That is very frustrating, especially as there have not been enough resources for gender issues,” she told TerraViva.

The speculation that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would name a new under-secretary-general to head the proposed woman’s entity (one of the rumoured front runners being former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet) never came to pass.

An international coalition of over 300 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), mostly comprising women’s rights activists, has been pursuing a global campaign for Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) in the U.N. system.

Charlotte Bunch, founding director of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University and co-facilitator of the GEAR campaign, told TerraViva that decisions about gender architecture reform are part of the system-wide coherence process in the General Assembly.

“So the CSW is not really an arena for formal progress in terms of the resolution,” she said. “However, we do feel there has been a lot of progress in terms of gaining more governmental support and attention to this issue during the CSW.”

For example, she said, a significant number of countries from all regions spoke in support of the new architecture in their speeches.

The secretary-general himself called on governments to take action to create the entity without further delay, she pointed out.

Bunch said the NGO action – holding up a ‘GEAR UP NOW!’ sign in the balcony during his speech on International Women’s Day on Mar. 3 – was greeted with enthusiastic applause from the audience and a wave from the U.N. chief.

Natalia Cardona of Social Watch, an international network comprising coalitions of civil society, said as far as her organisation was concerned, the CSW was a success because “it captured the dynamism of women’s activism at the highest level.”

“There is no other place where women activists can come together and discuss women’s human rights situation from all over the world,” she said.

However, the space in terms of government accountability and government accessibility has dwindled since 1995 when the world conference on women was able to make key advances in terms of women’s rights as enshrined in the Beijing Platform for Action, Cardona told TerraViva.

There is a sense now in the women’s movement that this 15th anniversary of the Beijing Conference was not much of an anniversary.

First, because of the administrative problems associated with hosting so many events, and the lack of physical space for women who came here with high hopes to access the U.N. and their governments.

The first blow for women at this CSW came in the form of the rather weak negotiated outcome document released by governments.

This step, on the part of governments, sucked the energy of what women felt was a space to advance women’s rights.

“Now, some may say that this weakening of CSW has been happening for years. However, this was an opportunity for governments to engage and renew their international commitments to women’s rights, but instead they chose the path of avoidance, and women activists felt their needs had no place to be heard and be taken seriously,” Candona added.

Judith Yewoenao, national women’s chairperson for Ghana’s Health Services Workers’ Union, was optimistic: “This was not just a talk shop. In other words, we don’t come and talk and go home and do nothing. We will go home and take measures on educating our women and enlightening them on women’s issues.”

“What I am saying is that most of the issues that came up here have to be taken up by governments, because most of them are policy statements and if governments are able to put down drastic measures to deal with this, we won’t have to keep repeating the same messages over and over,” Yewoenao told TerraViva.

She said women form the greater part of the population in most countries, and if women are well educated on human rights issues and women’s issues, “then the countries will be a better place to live.”

Dr. Hanifa Mezoui, a former senior U.N. official and a professor from Algeria, told TerraViva it has been 15 years since Beijing and there are many issues that remain to be explored.

“What does it take to make it better? It is with great despair that we still haven’t met the goal. We still don’t have women’s empowerment,” she said.

She said the CSW was very successful but there are huge political challenges ahead.

Bunch said the GEAR campaign’s greatest concern now is not whether the gender entity will be created – but what will be created.

“We have been assured it will be done by the end of the current session of the General Assembly in September and in time for the summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),” she said.

But there are still a number of important details to be resolved, she added.

“We have noted repeatedly that in order for the entity to be effective – as a driver for the U.N. system on women’s rights and empowerment – it must have a strong country-level operation,” Bunch said.

This requires that it be more than just a coordinating or advisory body and that it has the capacity to hold the U.N. system accountable for gender mainstreaming as well as to engage in its own programmatic work at all levels, Bunch declared.

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.

The CSW trade union delegation.

Selina Rust interviews GEMMA ADABA of the International Trade Union Confederation

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS/TerraViva) Thirty women union delegates representing a million working women in their membership came to the CSW here to advocate on behalf of women’s rights at work around the globe.

TerraViva correspondent Selina Rust spoke to Gemma Adaba from the ITUC about the progress of women’s rights in the workplace.

TV: While working women have made significant progress in getting decision-making jobs in the industrial world, they are still lagging far behind men in the developing world. How wide is this gap, and how could it be rectified?

GA: It varies a lot from country to country. Even in the developed world, women feel that there is still progress that needs to be made. In governments as well as in the public services and in the private sector, we have to work very proactively on affirmative action in the professional life and put it equally in decision-making.

The developing countries have not really instituted systems of affirmative action but they have made progress. So many developing countries have begun to look at procedural instruments they can use to advance gender equality in decision-making.

TV: How successful are trade unions in protecting the rights of women in the workplace? Are there still any major institutional barriers to overcome?

GA: In pretty much all countries we still have basic structure discrimination. Whereas men are situated manly in the productive sector, women work in both the productive and the reproductive sectors. Basically, you would find that men have all the time that they need to focus on advancing professionally in the world of work. But women have to combine those concerns about advancing in the world of work with all of the concerns of caring for their children and other family members. And of course, that takes away a lot of their time. It is also unpaid work.

TV: Many countries offer paid parental leave for the husband and/or the wife to care for their children at infancy: a privilege mostly practiced in Scandinavian countries. Will this trend ever catch up with the rest of the world?

GA: We certainly hope it would catch up. With the trade union movement we have been promoting the ILO convention 156, which is the convention dealing with equal responsibilities between women and men in terms of family care. This convention sets out the whole framework, and it is necessary for countries to ratify this convention, to incorporate it into their legislation and then implement it.

We think that there will be progress. We have been doing a lot of work in that area, like sensitising people and governments about pay inequity, gaps and structure discriminations.

TV: What has changed in terms of women’s rights at work since Beijing 15 years ago?

GA: I think this is manly about awareness of structure discrimination against women. I think a lot of analysis has been done which actually demonstrates that policies are not gender neutral. We have to incorporate gender equality objectives in order to advance gender equality. This message now is catching on among men who oftentimes are the decision makers. I think this awareness-raising and consciousness-raising is something that has been advanced.

TV: Have working women benefited from the current two-week session of the Commission on the Status of Women?

GA: We faced major challenges and obstacles to engage within the U.N. during this two-week session.  Lots of people came to this meeting with great expectations and the U.N. was just not equipped with the necessary physical structure to receive all these people. Due to the renovations, we had a lot of access restrictions, which means that we have not been able to engage as meaningfully as we could have.

But within the trade union movement we have been following in particular the resolution on the economic empowerment of women. We have tried to put in some amendments that focus on the issues of women’s rights and women’s rights at work, like the right for collective bargaining, and the right to access to resources, education, training, health as well as credit.

TV: In which sectors has gender equality been largely achieved and in which are there still barriers to overcome?

GA: In the teaching and health sector for example, we do have a majority of women. But in highly professional fields, like doctors and engineers, we still have to bridge the equality gap between men and women.

The segregated sectors, like the mining sector, the car-making industry, machinery and the transport sector, are still dominated by men. But there are women’s committees that are trying to find ways to advance women in sectors that have been traditionally segregated in favour of men.

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.

Any notion that a gender-responsive curriculum, which ensures gender equality, should be taught is taking a back seat to other socio-economic problems plaguing one of the most unequal countries in the world.

Today, 15 years after the official demise of apartheid, government estimates it needs at least 35 billion U.S. dollars just to fit all schools with the basics – classrooms, water, toilets and electricity.

Even if this amount was spread over a ten year period – leaving many schools without facilities until 2020 – government still could “not afford it”, officials told parliament 18 months ago.

The situation has worsened since then. Five weeks ago, the government official in charge of delivering primary and secondary schooling Bobby Soobrayan, told South Africa’s parliament that the country now faces “a crisis in basic education”.

Teachers Thandi Mapalakanye and Andre Marais are right at the frontline in the post-apartheid education system.

Teaching at two of the thousands of derelict schools reserved for “non-whites” by the apartheid system, Marais says, “I can tell you with certainty, gender equity is not taught in poor schools”.

Marais teaches 15 year olds at the Rosendal High School in Delft, a typical Cape Town ghetto built on sand dunes about 28 kilometres from the affluent city centre.

The school hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons last year when it’s headmaster was accused in the local media of expelling pregnant school girls as soon as their pregnancies became visible – and of not allowing them to return to school after their babies were born.

“I am teaching a class of 67 kids. The kids are sitting on the floor. This school needs so many more teachers but the education department refuses to give us even one more,” Marais told IPS.

“Gender is just not an issue to many teachers. There is no idea how to deal with teenage girls getting pregnant; there is absolutely no sensitivity. I can safely say it is the same throughout the whole of Delft,” said Marais.

Mapalakanye teaches 16 to 18 year old boys and girls at a historically Black high school near Johannesburg.

More than 1500 kilometres away from Delft, Mapalakanye says her P.T. Xulu Secondary School near Johannesburg shares the same problems as Rosendal High School.

She explains that in her school of 1200 pupils, there are between 90 and 110 pupils in every class.

“It is more difficult for girls but because of these other problems, I haven’t even begun to consider the gender implications yet,” Mapalakanye told IPS.

University of Johannesburg Centre for Education Rights and Transformation senior researcher, Salim Vally, estimates that gender based violence in schools has become more severe since 2002 when a Lancet study revealed that 33 percent of South African rape survivors were girls who had been raped by members of the school community, other pupils, or school staff.

Vally told IPS that the government’s focus on the Millennium Development Goal on gender doesn’t help.

Goals number two and three call for gender parity in primary and secondary education by 2015.

“We have gender parity in schools; in fact there are more girls in secondary school than boys. But gender parity data masks other issues, like how we provide equal safe access to education for girls. It takes more than just an equitable ratio of girls to boys in education to address entrenched patterns of gender based discrimination and violence,” he said.

The large amounts of harassment girls are subjected to affects the quality of their education.

“The formal curricula is complete with exhortations against sexism. Compared to apartheid curricula it’s a huge advance,” Vally says.

But he cautions that whether South Africa’s “gender-responsive curriculum” policies are implemented is highly doubtful and contested.

He adds that young women in South Africa’s shantytowns, or informal settlements, are not on the same footing as suburban girls. According to the latest Household Survey, 16 percent of South African children don’t have one or both parents. Girls from informal settlements or the rural areas, where the rate of unemployment is as high as 60 percent, are more likely to end up looking after younger brothers and sisters.

“There is great pressure on school-going girls because they are seen as primary caregivers,” Vally adds.

The class divide is starkly illustrated in an interview with a pupil of colour who attends a well-resourced school that, under apartheid, was reserved for whites only.

Salmah Peters (17) is in her final year at Hottenhots Holland High School in Somerset West, a suburb about 40 kilometres from Cape Town.

She seems oblivious to gender issues in general and says of her school experience that girls are encouraged by the teachers to study in formerly male disciplines like engineering.

“For the first two years of high school they separate girls and boys into different classes because they say we girls will achieve better than if the boys are there to distract us. But for the last three years we are back in the same classes” Peters says.

“There is no violence against girls here, although sometimes we fight each other about boys and little things,” she adds.

“Life for Black working class girls in South Africa is so much harder. We have to constantly remind people that, post-apartheid, racism, sexism and class divides still exist in society and in the education system,” Vally concludes.

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.

But when a single classroom opened in her village, the inquisitive teen had the chance to live one of her greatest dreams: getting an education.

Her story was told in the film, “Rising Voices- Raising Yusriya”, presented by the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) and UNICEF on the occasion of the 54th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

“We need empirical and evidence-based videos like that,” said Changu Mannathoko, UNICEF Senior Education Advisor. “That way policy makers can see the reality.”

According to Mannathoko, early marriage, poverty, labour, social norms and cultural practices still restrain girls from getting a quality education in higher school levels.

UNICEF says that more than half of the estimated 101 million children not attending school are girls.

However, Elizabeth Fordham, who is the UNESCO Education Programme Adviser, told TerraViva that there has been a tremendous change in terms of primary school enrolment for girls during the last 10 years.

“There are more girls in school then ever before. But there are still areas were we are making slow progress at the secondary and higher levels,” she said.

Although gender equality at the primary school level has been largely achieved, barriers to girls’ education persist: Poverty, the costs of education, and long distances to school are key factors.

In some countries, the gaps between boys and girls are still widening, Fordham said. In Sub-Saharan Africa and in South and West Asia, exclusion rates even have increased for girls.

In these areas, the gender parity rate in terms of women’s literacy has remained the same over the past 15 years.

According to Fordham, it is a matter of government commitment to work against cultural and religious attitudes that girls don’t need to be educated.

“The rewards of investing in girl’s education are tremendous,” she told TerraViva. “If you educate a girl, you are educating a whole family, a community, an area.”

The community schools shown in the video “Rising voices, raising Yusriya” have emerged as a strong example of child-centreed schools that provide access and quality education to children from rural areas.

Through community mobilisation and support from the ministry and UNICEF, girls in Abu Teeg have the chance to go to a community school for the very first time.

Like 13-year-old Yusriya, many are teaching their families new words they learned in school.

In terms of her behaviour, ideas and vocabulary, Yusriya’s mother can already see a huge difference between her and her uneducated sisters.

Due to the distance, her older sisters were not allowed to attend school. Their father didn’t see the point in investing in his daughters’ education.

For Yusriya, on the other hand, the advantages of going to school are obvious: “Education really enlightened my life,” she said. “In a few years I am able to go to the university. I really want to be a doctor!”

Margot Wallström, special representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, says that women's security is the best measure of national security. UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Marguerite A. Suozzi

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 11 (IPS/TerraViva) There is little disagreement among United Nations member states that involving women in peace processes is crucial to their success.

But despite of this consensus, manifested in the unanimous support of Security Council Resolution 1325, passed in October 2000 and which addresses the impact of war on women, challenges remain for the international community to debunk many prevailing attitudes about gender, and to achieve gender parity in conflict prevention, resolution, and peacekeeping efforts.

In January, the gender statistics of the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) indicated that women constitute just over three percent of peacekeeping personnel in its 19 missions, employing nearly 97,000 male military and police personnel, versus less than 3,000 female personnel.

In Nepal, women have been largely left out of peace negotiations since 2006, according to Bandana Rana, the regional coordinator of the South Asian campaign for gender equality and the executive president of Sati Organisation, an NGO working on violence against women and children in Nepal.

After Nepal’s 13-year civil war, where women constituted approximately one-third of the armed rebel army, it was not until the last stage of drafting Nepal’s new constitution that four women were included in the drafting committee.

“All the peace agreements and peace negotiations and the talks that took place between different political parties did not see women’s participation at all,” Rana said.

“Women were more or less perceived as passive victims of war, rather than active agents of change, where they had actually gathered and got a lot of knowledge and expertise and experience,” she said, “That was not recognised.”

At the most rudimentary level, sustained threats to women’s dignity and security hinder their active participation in the peace process.

In her first presentation as Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Margot Wallström cited the Democratic Republic of Congo as the epicentre of the crisis of sexual violence against women.

 ”My message to the guardians of global public opinion in the global peace and security sphere: rape is never inevitable, it’s a crime of concern to the international community. And the U.N. estimates that over 200,000 women have been raped during 12 years of war in the DRC,” she said.

“In my view, women’s security is the best measure of national security,” said Wallström.

“Strategies to protect women, are also strategies to protect women’s participation. If women are unable to safely access fields, or go to the well, marketplaces, or polling booths, if girl’s are unable to safely get to school, then social-economic recovery will be stalled.”

Audun Lysbakken. Credit: Bomoon Lee/TerraViva

Christian Benoni interviews AUDUN LYSBAKKEN, Norway’s first male minister for Gender Equality

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 11 (IPS/TerraViva) Gender equality in all its aspects has been the primary issue on the minds of delegates attending the two-week U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. And one factor that has emerged clearly is the need for involvement of men in this fight.

Audun Lysbakken, Norway’s first male minister for Gender Equality and Children’s Affairs, is the epitome of this fight. The 32-year-old deputy leader of the Socialist left party has sought to revitalise the gender equality debate in Norway, where he is involved in a spirited campaign to raise men’s awareness about the importance of women empowerment.

He has successfully advocated for mandated paternity leave, one of the most extensive parental leave schemes in the world – 46 weeks, with 10 weeks for the father – fully paid. He is a firm believer in men staying at home to help in the upbringing of their children.

Lysbakken speaks candidly with Terraviva’s Christian Benoni about his campaign.   

TV: How do you feel being the first male minister for a ministry that has in most instances been headed by women?

AL: I am very proud to be a minister of gender equality and children, and I believe it is important that men know and understand the necessity of gender equality. My point here is that if we are to have development, if we are to have economic recovery, equality is extremely important. If we continue to sideline half of the world’s population – women – then we will not see development. We see that the countries that invest in women and girls are improving and developing, whereas the countries that do not are lagging behind; they are slowing down their development.     

TV: What is the role of men in gender empowerment; and are they performing it?

AL: Overall, men today are not performing that role, but we are trying to encourage men in Norway to do it. I think more and more men are beginning to build an interest in gender equality and are realising it is a common good for our society. It means that our economic performance will do better, we will have more welfare if we use the resources of women as well.

But then I believe also, for a lot of men in our country, the right to choose to be at home with children when they are small, to be fathers the same way that women are mothers, is something more and more men are beginning to embrace.

Then lastly I believe men need to mobilise other men to change their culture and attitude when it comes to issues about violence against women, because all men have a responsibility to do something about this problem. As long as violence against women persists, we can never reach full gender equality.

TV: You are an advocate for mandated paternity leave. How has the response been in your country, and what lesson does it carry for developing nations?

AL: The response has been tremendous in my country. It means that it is possible for women to combine careers and having children, and it is even easier with the support of men who also stay at home for some time helping with taking care of the children. This creates more room for women in working life. I believe this is an important investment for countries.

Norway did not invest in paternity leave schemes after it got prosperous. We are prosperous because we invested in gender equality and it is important that all nations see that equality is a prerequisite for development, not the other way round.

 TV: How practical is this in the developing world considering the issue of affordability?

 AL: Of course there will always be a relation between what you can achieve and the economic situation. My point is that we must not see equality as something that we should create after a nation has become prosperous because equality is important to make a nation prosperous. This means that if we do not invest in the female population, a lot of problems will persist.

For instance, education for the girl child is probably one most effective investment for development. Over the last 15 years since we adopted the Beijing Platform for action, more girls across the world have access to education. But there are other areas where little progress has been made.

TV: Like which ones?

AL: In many parts of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is to give birth. There has been practically no progress at all in reducing maternal mortality since Beijing. The same political will that has seen investment in education should be applied to addressing maternal mortality so that women have access to basic health services.

We need to ensure the right policy change, and back such change with adequate funding. If we neglect this, we will be treating women as second-class citizens despite all the international treaties and resolutions we have solemnly adopted.