by Caiphas Chimhete
The Beijing momentum, which started four years ago in the Chinese capital, continues to
strengthen in the southern Africa region as gender activists intensify their lobby for equality and women’s advancement.
“Four years since the largest gathering of women in history, the flame that was lit at Beijing is still burning around the world. For southern Africa, the flame was activated with the signing of the Gender and Development Declaration at the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Malawi in 1997,” says SADC Gender Monitor, a forthcoming bulletin by the SADC Gender Unit in collaboration with Women in Development Southern African Awareness (WlBSAA) Programme of the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC).
The Gender Monitor is an annual publication that aims to track and highlight progress on the implementation of pledges made at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in China in 1995.
Soon after the Beijing conference, a Regional Gender Advisory Committee, a structure born out of a task force that co-ordinated the preparatory meetings for Beijing conference, held several post-mortem workshops as well as drawing up strategies for networking as a region to implement the Plan of Action (PFA).
The SADC region identified four critical areas of concern namely human rights, economic
empowerment, power sharing and decision-making and institutional mechanisms. It is these critical areas of concern as well as those of national priority that SADC governments and women’s organisations are striving to improve to ensure that women achieve equality with men.
As a result of the signing of the historical Gender and Development Declaration by SADC heads of state in Malawi in 1997, a Gender Unit was established at the SADC Secretariat in Gaborone, Botswana in 1998, to co-ordinate the mainstreaming of gender issues into the SADC programme of action and community-building initiative.
In September of the same year, SADC leaders signed an addendum to the declaration on violence at the 1998 summit in Mauritius. The addendum calls for the eradication of some of the traditional norms and religious beliefs, practices and stereotypes that legitimatise the persistence and tolerance of violence against women and children.
Expressing their commitment to gender equality, the SADC governments pledged to put in place regional polices, programmes and mechanisms to enhance the security and empowerment of women, and to monitor their implementation.
The success of the declaration and other conventions will depend on the effort put by the leaders and people of the SADC region to fulfil their commitment at both national and regional levels.
In line with the Beijing PFA, countries are putting in place programmes to address gender
disparities in different areas. South Africa for instance took a move to narrow the gender gap in access to and participation in economic structures through the introduction of a Women’s Budget Initiative (WB!) in 1996. The WBI is designed to ensure that women’s needs are considered in national budgets.
Other countries in the region such as Mozambique, Namibia and Tanzania have started devising ways to introduce women-friendly national budgets emulating the South African experience. In Zimbabwe, a Women’s Bank was established to provide rural women with access to credit.
SADC governments have through the Gender and Development Declaration committed themselves to ensuring that women occupy at least 30 percent of positions in political and decision-making structures by the year 2005. The percentage of women involved in positions of political power differs from country to country in the region.
In both Mozambique and South Africa, women account for 25 percent of members of parliament, ranking among the top eight countries in the world for female representation in parliament. Both countries use an electoral system of proportional representation, and in both cases, the party with the majority seats has nominated one-third women candidates.
In some Countries in the region, women’s caucuses, coalitions and trust funds have been established to provide solidarity and financial assistance to female candidates for general and local government elections.
“Women in the region believe their caucuses provide solidarity, co-operation and a possible solution to political divisions that hinder the struggle for equal participation with men in decision-making,” says a forthcoming book Beyond Inequalities: Women in Southern Africa.
In an effort to promote and protect all the human rights of women, all SADC countries but one (Swaziland) have signed, ratified or acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDA W).
Most countries have or are in the process of amending their statutes and reforming their constitutions to ensure equality and non-discrimination under the law. In 1996, Botswana passed a bill repealing a provision that denied women married in community of property the right to have immovable property registered in their names, into law.
In 1996, Zambia amended its constitution to include sex as one of the grounds on which discrimination is outlawed while Namibia approved the Married Persons Equality Bill in the same year, marking a milestone in the struggle of women to obtain equality with their husbands before the law.
In Mauritius, domestic violence was made a criminal offence in 1997. The new law is a major breakthrough that comes in the wake of the region’s recognition of the high incidences of domestic violence in southern Africa.
Although several conventions, treaties and agreements have been signed by many countries in the region, a lot still needs to be done to improve the status of women in southern Africa. The agreements have not been fully translated into real practical actions that benefit women.
“Unfortunately most legal reforms in the SADC countries tend to be done piece-meal and are not designed within the comprehensive context of achieving full gender equality and women’s empowerment,” says Bookie Monica Kethusegile, Head of Programme of WIDSAA.
Kethusegile says “regular monitoring of progress using indicators is necessary in order to adjust policies and programmes to reduce gender inequality. The need for gender disagregated data, particularly on time use, remains vital, otherwise national machinery’s will remain ill-equipped to undertake their tasks.” (SARDC)
