A month ahead of the 2010 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) review summit at the United Nations, some women’s groups are voicing concern that member states’ commitment to women’s issues is insufficient and slowing progress towards gender parity worldwide.

In June, a “draft outcome” document was released and has been circulating amongst U.N. groups in anticipation of September’s summit. The document re-affirms the commitment of U.N .member states to achieving the eight MDG goals by the year 2015, as outlined in 2000′s Millennium Declaration.

The 23-page draft details the progress made and challenges that remain in reaching the goals by the proposed deadline. Although there are some areas in which progress has been significant, other areas are falling far short of projected goals. Several women’s advocacy groups are blaming this disparity on the U.N.’s inadequate commitment to women’s rights.

For example, whereas efforts towards MDG 1 (cutting 1990 poverty rates in half by 2015) have seen considerable success, other goals, such as MDG 5 (improving maternal health) are nowhere near the projected success rate. In fact, between 1990 and 2005, maternal deaths were reduced by less than one percent – far from the goal of a three- quarters reduction by 2015.

Similarly, progress towards targets of MDG 3, such as boosting women’s political participation and eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2015, has been halting.

The problem, some women’s groups say, is the entire approach towards understanding and addressing problems of gender inequality. Focusing on individual women’s issues, such as maternal mortality and access to education, fails to take the larger picture into consideration – the symptoms are being treated while the infection spreads.

To read the full article, click here.

Photo credit: ollesvensson

A recent report published by the Society for International Development’s (SID) regional office for East Africa, on Kenya’s long term development blue print- the Vision 2030 highlights the continued perceived tensions between growth and equity within the economic discourse. Kenya’s Vision 2030 which was officially launched in 2008, seeks to transform Kenya into a ‘newly-industrializing middle-income country, providing a high quality of life for all its citizens, in a safe, secure world.’ Kenya is now mid-way through the first medium term plan (2008-2012) developed out of this long –term blue print. However, very little has been done to interrogate the likely impacts of the strategies  proposed by the Vision, particularly its abilities to tackle existing income and gender inequalities. The issue of income inequalities is particularly critical given that such inequalities are said to have exacerbated tensions and civil unrest, following the disputed presidential elections of 2007. Gender inequalities on the other hand, have contributed to un-employment and under employment, low education and health achievements and overall poverty.

Under the economic pillar of the Vision 2030 two key issues stand out regarding the choice of priority sectors and flagship economic projects projected to bring about economic transformation. Firstly, the selection of sectors is grounded on the understanding that the chosen sectors account for 50 per cent of those in formal employment. Secondly these sectors have been attributed to be responsible for 57 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (1). Yet as at 2005/6 Kenya’s labour force was predominately located in the agricultural and informal sectors; not the formal sector. In percentage terms, the distribution of the working population between the modern (formal), informal and agricultural sectors, was estimated at 14 per cent, 46 per cent and 41 per cent respectively, suggesting that the targeted sectors represent under one-fifth of the current working population, albeit they generate quite a significant portion of the country’s income. Individuals find it easier to be employed in the informal and agricultural sectors due to existing barriers or requirements for entry into the formal employment market, such as: educational attainment, training and experience. Access to finance, access to/control over capital assets, and occupational segregation, are other hindrances to participation in the formal employment market. Many of these issues disproportionately affect women. As at 2006, women constituted 30 per cent of the labour force or 43 per cent of male employment. Women continue to be disproportionately represented among the country’s poor.

A quick look at Kenya’s life expectancy rates and HIV/AIDS prevalence rates by sex, shows how such inequalities have impacted upon males and females, respectively. Female mortality and morbidity, relative to male mortality and morbidity rates due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and other health issues, remain a serious problem for the country. For females these outcomes are linked to their economic, political and social marginalisation, but very little in terms of concrete and transformative strategies are proposed within the Vision for addressing these issues. Though the Vision does speak to the issue of gender inequalities, it unfortunately stops short of articulating sufficiently radical solutions that would offer women greater autonomy and voice and a greater ability to tackle their agency.

Though the social pillar of the Vision 2030 does speak on the issue of equity and suggests some ways of tackling these issues, the solutions are limited mainly to the education and training sub-sector of the social pillar. Other sub-sectors that have to do with health, water and sanitation, housing, and environment do not provide concrete ways of engaging marginalised individuals into mainstream development processes through measures that can either improve their access to assets such as land and affordable housing. Moreover, there is hardly any attempt to challenge the institutions and processes which have served to curtail women’s abilities to take advantage of opportunities to better themselves. Though there is a sub-sector under the social pillar, intended to deal with gender issues (as well as the youth and other vulnerable groups), and though there is reference to gender mainstreaming of development interventions, the fact that the proposed solutions are isolated under this sub-sector, suggest challenges for the integration and implementation of these proposed solutions within the Vision.

Economists have argued that pursuing equity takes away from the efficiency of growth efforts and that once growth is achieved then countries can move on to addressing the equitable distribution of the benefits of such growth. Yet this has always been a challenge as the beneficiaries of such growth have tended to be reluctant to support such measures by government. Addressing equity  is  not only about ensuring ‘fairness’ for all- to be allowed to realise their developmental potentials; it also makes common sense in a country’s pursuit of broad-based  and sustainable growth and development.

For the Vision 2030 and similar plans, questions need to be asked regarding the capacities of the chosen strategies to generate the kind of employment opportunities that would see a large number of Kenyans, lifted out of the poverty trap.  It is also important to question how many of the currently disenfranchised will be brought on board mainstream development efforts through such strategies i.e. how many new entrants and from which sections of society. The challenges of existing inequalities to Kenya’s development have been under-played for too long. Whereas Kenya has shown itself capable of generating the necessary growth  to transform the lives of its people, history has also shown how such inequalities can quite quickly and effectively undermine such gains, ending many years of development investment and hard work.

Read also: SID Regional Office launches gender analysis study of Kenya’s ‘Vision 2030′

* Hulda Ouma is Programme Coordinator, Gender & Development, at the SID Regional Office for East & Southern Africa

Helen’s many achievements include groundbreaking advocacy on the impact of aid and trade on women’s lives in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the launching of the More Women More Power campaign for equal representation of women in politics. Helen began her career as a teacher and later moved to development work, working in organisations such as War on Want. She works in London as an independent researcher on development policy and women’s rights campaigning.

The recognition of Helen’s work for women is not only a well deserved award for Helen but also a welcome recognition of the importance of achieving gender equality and equal opportunities globally. The award marks hope that the steady commitment of outstanding women like Helen is finally coming to fruition, coinciding as it does with the historically important establishment of UN Women.

See what Helen has to say about UN Women.

The UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women is an important step forward world wide for gender and empowerment. Many working for development and equality have high expectations that UN Women will as Charlotte Bunch says advance ‘the human rights of women as central to global policy efforts to reduce poverty and move toward greater realization of peace and democracy in the world.’ We hope UN Women will make good the promise to forge effective partnerships with civil society and to ensure that the UN system keeps its commitments on gender equality.

SID has just published a special issue of Development 52.3 on gender and empowerment (www.sidint.org/development) and we asked some of the contributors what they saw UN Women as being able to achieve. What is abundantly clear from the journal issue is that UN Women has been the result of a long and hard struggle for women’s rights activists and it is important to have resources, leadership and partnership for its success.

	"Finally the UN recognizes that women's rights and gender equality is not a marginal issue within UN's priorities. Let's celebrate UN WOMEN with hope" Jacqueline Pitanguy SID Vice President, Brazil
	"With UN Women we can finally achieve global citizenship and have our demands for worldwide gender justice legitimated" Cecilia M. B. Sardenberg, Professor, Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre a Mulher - NEIM, Brazil
	'My hope is that UN Women will put respect for women's human rights at the top of all UN agendas, and match the commitment with resources.' Helen O'Connell OBE, London UK
	UN Women finally gives a structure and an institutional home to decades of women's tireless organizing and advocacy for peace, gender equality and social justice. It's none too soon in a world fraught with conflict and desperate for new thinking and visionary leadership. Rosalind Petchesky, Professor New York University, USA
	"Congratulations to the UN for finally establishing a stronger more coherent entity for promoting women's empowerment within the UN system and around the world. Women's movements have struggled for this for a long time. Our hope now is that it will be led by someone who recognizes the critical role of women's movements in the on-going struggles for gender equality and women's empowerment." Peggy Antrobus former General Coordinator of DAWN and author of the The Global Women's Movement, Barbardos
	With the support of local and global women's organizations and an international commitment to ensuring good leadership and the power to get things done, UN Women has the potential to achieve goals of reducing poverty, promoting empowerment, and advancing justice for women around the world. Christine Koggel, Professor Carlton University
	UN WOMEN: a hard won achievement of women's relentless organizing! It’s about time for the UN to finally make this crucial commitment with the women of the world: a strong global champion for women’s rights and gender justice, we expect nothing less. UN WOMEN should strongly support and complement the efforts of women’s organizations and movements worldwide, fully recognizing them as a key constituencies and allies. Secretary General, we need you to appoint the right person to lead UN WOMEN: a strong and committed, passionate, internationally recognized visionary woman, ready to do what it takes to get this entity up and running in the most strategic and effective ways. Lydia Alpizar Executive Director AWID

This report constitutes an attempt to audit Kenya’s Vision 2030 from both an income inequalities and a gender inequalities perspective, and to assess the ability of the Vision to respond to both of these persistent development challenges. Historically, Kenya has been one of the most unequal societies in the world. The launch of the Vision 2030 thus provided a key opportunity to suggest ways of better conceptualizing and addressing these inequalities for the good of development in the country. The rationale for this audit was grounded in what is now a well-acknowledged fact, that both income and gender inequalities hinder development. They have been found to negatively affect development efforts and present a challenge to the sustainability of development gains at individual, household and country levels.

The objectives of the audit are to contribute to enhancing development planning and resource allocation towards greater equity and equality. The audit is intended to help build understandings of government actors engaged in development planning and resource allocation, as well as their partners in civil society and the private sector, on the impacts of inequalities on development performance generally and specifically.

This publication was launched on Friday July 9, 2010 in Nairobi. Following a brief introduction to the publication, there was be a discussion on how Kenya’s Vision 2030 can respond to existing inequalities in Kenya, which constitute a challenge to the sustainability of any developmental gains made under the Vision 2030.

Invited speakers included:

Also present at the launch of the publication was Deputy Ambassador of the Royal Danish Embassy in Nairobi, Mr. Ole Thonke. This project was undertaken with the kind support of the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA).

by Sabina Zaccaro (IPS)

The 2010 Annual Ministerial Review (AMR) turns the spotlight on actions and progress made to meet the global agenda on women’s issues and to mainstream a gender perspective in all sectors. The purpose is to promote practical strategies to advance women’s participation as equal partners of sustainable development, peace and security, governance and human rights.

On the occasion of the AMR (28 June – 1 July 2010) IPS produced a special TerraViva ‘Equality and Empowerment of Women’. A printed version has been distributed in New York on Monday, June 28, and includes in-depth coverage of the main issues discussed at the meeting, filed from some of the countries that will voluntarily report their progress on development goal 3 at the meeting.

The magazine (pdf) is available for downloading on the IPS Gender Portal.

Fifteen years after the Beijing World Conference on Women, IPS remains committed to in-depth reporting on progress achieved and challenges facing women and girls. IPS has a long-standing editorial commitment to mainstreaming gender, which it has realised through training, editorial guidelines and targeted projects.

On the occasion of the 54th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in March this year, an international team of journalists provided special coverage from New York and produced two printed editions of IPS TerraViva.

The special Gender TerraViva are part of the IPS programme “Communicating for Change: Getting Voice, Visibility and Impact for Gender Equality”. The IPS cast of stories includes independent coverage financed through the Dutch Government’s MDG3 Fund: Investing in Equality, and through the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).

by Wendy Harcourt

Domestic work the unrecognized pillar of the economy
Andrea’s intervention raised important insights into gender problems of migration within the European context where domestic work is being carried out more and more by migrant women, particularly in South Europe (Italy, Spain and Greece). She pointed out that domestic work is not another market, but a socially constructed gender activity where women are seen as primarily responsible for taking care of the home, family, children, disabled and  elderly. Though it is a largely unvalidated it is a profoundly important economic and social activity needed all over Europe. However much of the work in the household is invisible, unregulated and mostly in the informal and unpaid or badly paid sector.

She argued that there is a new gender order now taking place in Europe as a growing number of European women have moved into paid work in the public and private sector. This is a positive move, challenging the male bread winner role and leading to more economic independence for women. However it has not been followed by equal distribution of the household work between women and men. Instead of men taking up responsibilities for domestic care work, it is migrant women who are stepping in. Particularly in southern  Europe where there is a strong conservative  tradition of relying on the family rather than state, migrant women have taken up domestic work in large numbers.

Essentially domestic workers are helping to reconcile the balance between productive and reproductive work in family life in Europe. However, as Andrea points out those very same female workers are excluded from all policy agendas in European. In European debates on gender quality no recognition of their contribution to European gender equality project is evident. They are invisible from European discussions around rights, benefits, health care and economic security. As a result they earn low wages, work long and antisocial hours, are often undocumented and in the informal sector.

Revalidating domestic care work
But the main reason Andrea suggests for their poor economic and social conditions is because domestic care work is not seen as real work. Unpaid or badly paid care work is just not seen as contributing to European economic growth. It is stigmatized and seen as some how natural and rewarded in ways other than money. She argues that we need to challenge the stigma and low economic value given to the work and transform gender equality laws to value domestic work in order to improve the rights of migrant domestic workers. Domestic work and migrant rights needs to be reincluded in discussions of the European women’s movement on rights or development

She proposes strategies that cannot only help reinstate an understanding of migration but also help unravel today’s global world and the current economic crisis. She reminds us that in the 1960s and 1970s a major feminist battle had been for pay for domestic work and for the state to take up responsibility for care work. In different parts of Europe more child care facilitates, more state involvement in domestic  and care work were seen as the strategic way to break down structures of inequality between men and women, and change the public order of domestic life.

Although there are child care facilities in many places in Europe, Andrea questions if this strategy did indeed work. As we see in the current economic crisis, it is assumed that women who had moved out of the home to take up (largely) low paid jobs can now just return home.

What happened to gender equality for life/work balance. Is the answer for more state control of family life? Does that help the revaluing of domestic work, will it help the rights of migrant workers? What is the evidence that state policy helps to change the gender order regarding domestic work? Why does it remain undervalued and feminine, despite incentives such as paternity leave etc.

Who is the champion now?
Certainly the state support families but Andrea points out family policy even in Sweden, which is seen as the champion of gender, state policy did not change the gender order. Since the 1970s Sweden has offered comprehensive childcare, parental leave and child allowance but only  20% of Swedish fathers use parental leave. Furthermore, jobs in Sweden are highly segregated. Men tend to work in the private sector and women in the public sector. In the child care sector 95% percent of the employees are women. Essentially the responsibility duty and obligations for care have just been moved to women working in the public sector . So the trend has gone from women working unpaid in the home to women paid low wages to do care in the  public sector.  Nurses and teachers for example in Sweden are mainly women, and paid very badly. For example a nurse in a Swedish hospital with 3 years university education earns 35 % less than a male technician same hospital with no university education.
State involvement does not change the gender order, even if it may reduce gender inequality.

Organising for change
The question is how  to revalorize domestic work and care work at the national level. How to put care on the political agenda and on the trade union agenda? Solidarity is required to support care workers, both European and migrant domestic and care workers, perhaps the answer is to organize themselves.

This is a question for each nation state to deal with. Although the EU and international laws are there for domestic workers, the different migrant and gender regimes at the national level are really what determine change. In reality the EU has no capacity to inform national legislation. It is the national context which is the most important. For example when women in Slovenia and Croatia tried to put into practice policy that was passed at the EU and international level they found it did not work, such policy did not adapt to their reality.

One strategy is to reformulate migrant and domestic work as about labour rights, rather than women’s politics per se and therefore work along with trade unions. But perhaps most importantly, is for European and migrant women to network together, much openly about the problems they face in order to see they can collectively work together to put in place a new gender order. In this the WIDE Conference was an important step forward.

Related article: Taking Citizenship Rights with You – A new vision for human mobility

For more information on the WIDE conference, click here

Photo credit: celesteh/Flickr

The massive economic decline in the Palestinian Territories as a result of conflict and tight military closure, provoked humanitarian crisis, increase of poverty rate to 65.8% and unemployment rate of 28.9% (1) , leading to a dramatic worsening of life standards in particular of Palestinian women and girls, and producing what has been called de-development (2) . The last recent years following the election of Hamas in 2007, have been the hardest of the Palestinian history, either for the relapses over the internal political assets or for the impact on the international relations.

Palestinian women have always been an example of struggle and organization against the occupation power and the traditional male power, and have engaged along the years in a variety of aspects, such as access to education for girls, combating gender based violence, women’s economic and political empowerment, gender equality within the law. A Ministry of Women’s Affairs was created in 2003, Gender Units were set in all Ministries, the Institute of Women’s Studies was established at Bir Zeit University, in 2008 PNA ratified CEDAW, in 2009 a Palestinian Women’s Bill of Rights was drafted, in March 2010 a law punishing the honor crime was promulgated, a Gender National Strategy and a National Strategy to Combat Gender Based Violence are being drafted by Ministry of Women’s Affairs. Although this clearly shows the progressive action of the Palestinian institutions for the improvement of women’s status, there remains a critical gap between the legal framework, and the effective implementation of laws and regulations to advance women’s status at different levels. Data about presence of Palestinian women in the Institutions make clear that it is among the lowest in the world. Female participation in the Palestinian Legislative Council is 12.9%, in the municipalities 18%, only 11.2% of judges and 12.1% of prosecutors are women. The social and civil statutes record inequalities for women regarding divorce (unilateral for men), polygamy (4%), girls’ early marriages (14%) (3).

While there are no substantial differences in the participation of girls and boys up to the secondary schools, only 7.6% of young women hold a Bachelors or higher degree. This reflects in the economic life, where female labour market participation is only 15.4% (4) . Informal work (5) involve 6 out of 10 women. The labour market is clearly divided by sex: women have access to limited typologies of jobs, often located outside the areas of economic growth, unable to absorb a growing employment demand. In addition, a lack of adequate infrastructure to relief the burden of domestic care on women represents another reason of non-access to the formal labour market.

In the fragmented Palestinian context, there exists a combination of law systems, from those inspired to western codes, to the Shari’a, where is particularly strong the application of the Family Status Law, thus lacking a unified Family Law. In West Bank, this is based on the Jordanian Code, in Gaza Strip on the Egyptian Code, while to the women resident in Jerusalem is applied the Muslim Family Law in Israel. The inhomogeneous legal framework produces a whole of discriminations against women, characterized by limiting their access to the law, especially in terms of legal protection, and advancing opportunities such as equal salaries, right to maternity leave, retirement, protection from harassment at work, social security. Official data about sexual violence are very alarming: 61.7% of married women have been exposed to psychological violence, 23.3% suffered physical violence, 33% have been raped in 10.9% of cases by their husband or by a member of the family.

In this complex situation, besides the efforts of the Institutions to combat gender based violence, the Palestinian women’s movement is intensively working on the interpretation of the Shari’a, in order to redefine in a gender perspective issues such as the marriage, the divorce, the custody of the children, the inheritance (which in the majority of cases entail discriminations against women), also considering, although this inevitably causes divergences, the so-called “informal justice”, that is the codes involving the sulh (6) and the customary law, which is devolved only upon men, and the possibility to dialogue with the men islah (socially entrusted of conciliation among the parties) for the resolution of disputes.

If assuming that the concept of empowerment refers to the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make choices (7) acquire such ability, Palestinian women are still very disempowered: Palestinian women and girls are the main target of the conflict in terms of diminishing of access to services of reproductive health, increase of care work, scholastic drop out of the girls, diminishing of socializing opportunities, exposition to violence and insecurity. The physical interruption of the territory has produced a huge gap between centre and periphery. Remoteness and isolation of local areas have, in turn, lead to a diminishing of the political power of marginalized groups and poor women, leaving them weak to influence decision-making and to form representative political aggregation.

Their security and advancement is trapped between the Israeli occupation by one hand, and the constraints represented by a still strongly rooted male control of the society, by the other hand. Both the systems produce violence, impeding the full exercise of women’s agency and rights, and marking inescapably their future.

That is why there is still a strong need to continue, intensify, and support local and international programmes for the empowerment of the Palestinian women. Especially in the remote areas, where inequalities more evidently concern women’s access to political, social and economic power, and where women particularly are affected by the closure and the difficulty of movement, it is necessary to seriously integrate gender mainstreaming in the development processes at all levels, as a fundamental tool to consider the perspectives, the differences, the opportunities, and the responsibilities of women and men in all development and humanitarian aid initiatives. This implies to explore gender issues in sectors such as infrastructures, politics, social aggregation, culture, and economy, which only apparently may seem to benefit the population indistinctively in the cooperation framework. In this sense the efforts of Palestinian institutions, of local and international development agencies to protect women from discrimination and abuse, should focus on how to bridge the gap between central and peripheral areas, on how to link the advancing legal framework with the daily life of women in the marginalized areas. Only by promoting the full exercise of women’s right to citizenship – thus defining as a priority women’s human rights in the process of construction of the social, political, economic justice in the Palestinian Territories – the sexual difference and the experience of women, in my opinion, would be valorized and put at the centre of the political and development practices.

*Carla Pagano is a scholar in Arabic-Islamic cultures and works as independent Gender & Development Adviser for public Institutions and Research bodies.

(1) World Bank, West Bank and Gaza: Economic Developments and Prospects, March 2008.

(2) The interrelation between the forced capture of economy, a relation of dependency imposed, and the obstruction of the free development of the civil institutions.  Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: the political economy of de-development, in International Affairs, Oct., vol. 72, n. 4.

(3) Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestine in facts and figures, 2008.
Data about polygamy and divorce differ in every Arab Country. In a recent article, Valentina M. Donini (Polygamy and Family Law, in Reset DOC, April 2009, http://www.resetdoc.org/story/00000001317) reports that “according to a reformist interpretation, both polygamy and repudiation would not be admissible in the Arab world today, as the circumstances and reasons justifying them no longer exist in the current historical context”. Today only Tunisia has officially abolished polygamy and repudiation.

(4) Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Press Release “On the Eve of the International Population Day”, 17/07/2009.

(5) ILO defines the informal work as reflecting the characteristics of the work in lack of adequate social protection, underpayment, violation of fundamental human rights.

(6) A method for the solution of disputes based upon the conciliation which takes into account the whole of social norms, tradition and religion.

(7) Naila Kabeer in “UNRISD Discussion Paper 108”, Development and Change, Vol. 30 (1999), 435-464. Institute of Social Studies. Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999.

Photo credit:  PalFest

Interview by Angela Zarro

AZ: What does it mean today to be a woman in development in Africa?

MM: I would like to rephrase your question, and talk about our mission as feminists committed to issues of development and democracy in Africa, our reclaiming the concept of feminism – for the longest time we talked about gender activism – and now we talk aloud about the concept of transformative feminism. By ‘we’ I am referring here to Tanzania Gender Networking Programme, TGNP, and our many partners within the Feminist Activist Coalition, FemAct, and the African Feminist Forum. Transformative feminism – beyond  addressing the issue of gender balance and differences between women and men – means addressing  globalisation, class, race, gender identity, and taking back issues of imperialism as well as capitalism, and discrimination of all kinds.

AZ: What do you mean by taking back the concept of imperialism?

MM: The structural adjustment period and the neo-liberal ideology that came with it dismissed the discourse of our past that has been lost. People talk about globalisation and investment partners, but they do not talk about capitalism,  imperialism and exploiters.
We want to build a transformative feminist movement that challenges patriarchy and neo-liberalism at all levels.

AZ: The attention to women and gender balance has increased in recent years. However, sometimes it seems more emphasized than applied, with the result that the attention to the person behind the gender is diminished or even denied. What is your opinion? Don’t’ you think it may result in a boomerang effect for women?

MM: In the chosen area there has been a lot of deep surveys and window dressing on issue of gender equality and equity, but just this meeting is a good indication of how far we still have to go: the first panel included only male speakers although we have many women who can talk about the issues that were on the conference agenda.
Many of us believe that women have to be allowed to speak on their own behalf. We are putting a lot more attention into working with grassroots women activists and their organisations and networks so that they get the space – or take the space – to  speak on their own behalf. A lot of national activists and national NGOs are trying to raise the issues that reflect the interests and demands of  marginalised women among peasantry, workers or informal sector workers. But there is not enough of a strong popular mass movement – a transformative feminist movement – that cwould have the powr to pressurise the government.

TGNP is involved in budget analysis every year, but being part of a small group of NGOs, we do not really have power and we will not have power until a critical mass is generated.  And this requires organising and coalition-building at grassroots level which links up to a popular feminist movement,  and that means responding to the interests and demands of grassroots women themselves, and following their lead.

AZ: Which models and priorities are followed by young African women in their process of emancipation and empowerment?

MM: I think we can not generalise about young women. What is it like to be a young woman today in Tanzania? It depends, if you are  food  sellers on the street, (they are called mama nitilie), workers in a factory, domestic servants whose employers are other wealthy Tanzanian women, sex workers, college educated women, NGO officers, business women:  they are all young women.

All of these women may have their own perception of what they are doing but there is a rising will  and awareness – if not rage– about the need for change and social transformation now. I think there is subtle change and one important factor may be the impact exercised by middle class intellectuals, young women who are standing up and speaking out. The private commercial sector, interestingly, is where you find more space for young women and young professionals. At the same time, poor women in the informal sector and in the peasantry are also organising themselves to empower themselves economically, and in the process, they challenge both patriarchy and neo-liberalism.

I believe that we need to create the space to listen to the views of young women, to understand what these different groups of young women are trying to change, and to see to what extent they are able to keep at home the same power they seem to have at work. Do they carry that power back home or rather do they face patriarchal structures within their family? What I hear from some young people is that many middle class young women have a terrible situation. Men bring mistresses home, for instance, and expect their wives to serve them meals! And many put up with it, seemingly they fear the scorn of being alone without a husband! It is extremely humiliating. Would a poor peasant woman or an urban trader put up with such nonsense? I don’t think so.

There is an old saying that poor women are  more emancipated because they have nothing to lose. They just tell the man to ‘get out’ or they walk out with their children; they can find another man or another place to stay. It’s complicated. This is not new. Way back in the 1970s and 1980s peasant and working class women were quoted as refusing to remarry after the inevitable first marriage, and talked about marriage as ‘male colonisation’. In the 1980s and 1990s as men lost work and their wages and farm incomes declined, women became increasingly involved in paid work as producers and traders, both self-employed and paid workers, and many scoffed at the idea of having husbands – ‘why do I want another child to take care of?’

AZ: Is there still a high pressure women get from culture, religion and society? If so, how do they respond to this pressure?

MM: Yes, but it is not a static culture. Culture changes and one moment people claim tradition, another moment they totally refuse tradition especially in urban situations. Culture is often used as a strategy, sometime by men, sometime also by women to defend their own interests. There are aspects of traditions which are extremely useful to empower women. For instance, in the North of Tanzania, in Ngorongoro district – I did some work there with pastoralist women – women deliberately leverage the system of age grade and rituals of indigenous religion. Men can not stop women from engaging in traditional religion. When women organise themselves to meet under the tree, it is understood it’s something tradition related, and men can not interfere. If a man ever tries to stop a woman from attending the ritual meeting, the women have the right to hit the man and fine him a goat – a collective action by a group of women. Yes, women have power and they still exert that power.

The idea of powerless women victims in Africa is simply not correct. On the occasion of the recent Gender Festival in Dar es Salaam last September 2009, for example, more than fifty women came from Loliondo (Ngorongoro District) to protest land grabbing: their homes were burnt down and they and their families were forcibly evicted from their land by our government, because of demands from a private hunting company! They marched into the Gender Festival singing and carrying their posters, read out their protest message, and later, went to carry out a sit-in demonstration at the office of the President, State House.

In my experience working with pastoralist women in Ngorongoro, as well as grassroots women in many other places in Tanzania – you know the old saying from South Africa, ‘when you touch a woman you touch a rock’… – I have learned that there are many women who are prepared to stand up and denounce injustice completely, without fear, because they have nothing to lose. There are no benefits from the system they work and live in to discourage them from protesting. Moreover, they are driven by their commitment to their children and grand-children.

AZ: Which priority do you see for women and development today in your country? (education, labour rights, reproductive health, access to political power)

MM: In the organisation where I work – the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme – the priority is now to build a transformative feminist movement. Women need to organise themselves and network. They are already doing it, but much of the organising is very local, community based, with no linkages with each other. So the challenge now is more about building a movement and providing the space for grassroots women themselves to articulate their own demands.

AZ: So it is about strengthening what already exists?

MM: Yes, strengthening and facilitating and also providing women with a space, whether it is a public forum or a different kind. Not only that, but helping women to identify spaces which they have a right to enter and seize for themselves. And strengthening their capacity to assess the situation for themselves, analyse the basic causes, and take action for change – what we call ‘triple A: assess, analyse and act’.
For example, towards the end of every year, we attend the general budget support meeting organised by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs. In the past only donors and government were participating. Then the space  opened up slightly to civil society but the participants are mostly national NGOs. Now what we want is to work with grassroots women so that they can attend the next meeting and speak up on their own behalf, just as they do at the Gender Festivals. And while some are meeting within the General Budget Support Review, others are holding alternative sessions and marching on the street.

Marjorie Mbilinyi is a life-time scholar activist and active founder member of several feminist/gender-oriented organizations and networks in Tanzania and Africa, including the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme, where she is currently working.
She is retired Professor of Education from the University of Dar es Salaam and has extensive experience in participatory organizing, pedagogy and research at national and community level, linked to feminist advocacy and activism.

Photo credit: wwarby/Flickr; SID edit