Educate the Girl, Empower the Woman - IPS ipsnews.net

Bernice Sam of WILDAF (centre) discusses the importance of education and technology for rural women.

Credit:Andrea Lunt/IPS


By Andrea Lunt


UNITED NATIONS, (IPS) - Picture a mother, hunching over a field with a Medieval-style hoe in hand, spending day after day tilling the soil under a beating hot sun - only to retire home to care for her family without electricity or running water.

This is not a 12th century image, but a typical working day for scores of rural women in today's developing world, where lack of access to education and technology has forced many to resort to traditional and often painful methods of livelihood.

Abject poverty is, of course, one of the key causes, but there are also tangible and achievable ways of addressing realities such as these, according to African activists at this week's Commission on the Status of Women in New York.

Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF), a pan- African network bringing together individuals and organisations from 23 countries, is among the key regional groups tackling this issue head on.

WILDAF believes lack of knowledge about education rights, specifically among young girls, is one of the main reasons forcing rural people to endure lives of agricultural hardship.

Adaeze Agu, a New York-based Nigerian, is using education to empower young people in Ghana and Nigeria, as a volunteer with HIV advocacy group World Mission.

One of the charity's key projects involves teaching students, most of whom have lost parents to HIV/AIDS, agricultural techniques after school, with lessons involving everything from improving existing farming methods to modern packaging for export.

"The new generation of children learn technology faster, and when they learn they teach their mothers," Agu told IPS.

"We want to teach them how to develop projects, from tilling the ground to seeding, all the way through to packaging at an international level so the food will be accepted by everybody in other countries," she said.

Agu cited a project where female farmers of moringa – a nutritious African plant – were able to increase the efficiency and ease of production, through simple modern conveniences.

With help from World Mission, the women were given access to a van to transport their leaves to the city markets to be processed – rather than relying on irregular public buses – which saved time and increased the number of useable harvests.

Agu said the charity was also looking to raise money to invest in a specialised "leaf drying" machine, which would allow a cooperative of female farmers to transition from traditional sun-drying methods.

Bisi Olateru-Olagbegi, executive director of the Women's Consortium of Nigeria (WOCON) and board member of WILDAF, said educating girls with both formal and practical education was key to addressing the gender imbalances and breaking the cycle of poverty.

"When a women is empowered and she can assert her rights in the community she can rise up to any position and be part of decision making and raise the status of women," Olateru- Olagbegi said.

Although enrolment levels have risen in many developing countries since 2000, UNICEF estimated there were still more than 100 million children out of school in 2008, 52 percent of them girls and the majority living in sub-Saharan Africa.

As a result, illiteracy is high, mainly in rural areas where five to seven women over 10 years old can neither read nor write.

Olateru-Olagbegi said while some areas were progressing with gender equality, the "traditional and patriarchal practices" in many African regions were proving slow to change.

"[It has been thought] women are not supposed to be seen in public, they're supposed to be in the kitchen," she said. "But over the years this has been proved wrong, that it's not effective because both girls and boys need to be educated for us to have meaningful development."

Social activists have made great progress in Africa in recent years, fighting for women's rights to work and education.

Subsequently there has been a measurable increase in girls attending school, a trend that has led to fewer early marriages and teenage pregnancies as well as a reduction in the number of youths who are trafficked and prostituted.

In spite of the gains, however, girls are still largely underrepresented in the science and technology fields.

"Even when girls go to school there is a bias that girls are not supposed to learn science and technology; they're still doing the social sciences and humanities," Olateru-Olagbegi said. "They don't think that the faculties of girls are developed enough and it's mere discrimination."

This is not just a problem in Africa. At this week's CSW, representatives from European nations gathered to discuss the ongoing imbalance of women in the region's science and technology industries, focusing on opportunities in the emerging green jobs sector.

Kira Appel, Denmark's minister for gender equality, said correcting the imbalance would not only empower women, but strengthen the economies of progressive nations.

"A recent study in the Nordic countries proved that if you improve the gender balance within companies the innovation rate will double," Appel said. "We need women, for the sake of gender equality and women's empowerment, but also for the sake of the global brain race."

Olateru-Olagbegi told IPS that in Africa, addressing the current inequalities in schooling was a matter of convincing mothers that daughters were worth educating.

"We're educating the parents, particularly the mothers who are the first educators, to teach them that they should have gender balance in education and training for the children," she said. "So they don't allow the boys to go and play football while the girls stay in the kitchen."

(END)

EGYPT: Women and Men, Shoulder to Shoulder - IPS ipsnews.net

By Cléo Fatoorehchi

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 26, 2011 (IPS) - The momentous events of Tahrir Square, Egypt also signify a huge step forward for gender equality in the region, women's rights activists said Friday.

Nora Rafeh Refa Tahtawi, a youth activist who participated in the Tahrir protests and is now in New York for the two- week Commission on the Status of Women at U.N. headquarters, recalled that women stood side by side with men, all sharing the feeling that they belonged to the same movement with the same goals.

Dr. Azza Kamel, a prominent Egyptian women's rights activist, was also part of the movement that toppled president Hosni Mubarak earlier this month.

The Egyptian people simply want "freedom, justice, dignity", Kamel told IPS, and "this is the first time that women deal with dignity as equals with men."

"There is no room for ethnic tension," she added, highlighting the idea of "family" described by Tahtawi with the formula "one heart, one hand, one brain".

"No one will manage to divide them [the Egyptian people] now," Kamel said.

Dignity - karama in Arabic - is a word that was chanted often during the protests. It is also the name of an international grassroots organisation created in 2005, which is based in Egypt and has programmes throughout the Arab world, with offices in Sudan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Syria, and Jordan.

Hibaaq Osman, founder and executive director of Karama, emphasised to IPS that "this revolution brought people who are completely different, of class, of education, politically, in every way."

"They saw themselves as a community," she said. "They have unified their vision, they have unified their energy, this was about them and for them. Every woman was suffering the same way."

"When people come together…nothing is ever going to stop them," she told IPS. "They become the bulldozers. They broke the wall of fear, of gender, of poor and rich… everyone was equal standing there."

According to Kamel, while Tunisian women were the "catalyst" for Egyptian women, now Bahraini women are breaking barriers too, even though the society is more conservative.

"We are writing our history now, and the sky is our limit," said Tahtawi, promising the Libyan people, "You will win."

The head of the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights, Nihad Abou El Komsan, agreed that, "When women decide, there is no barrier."

She added that freedom can be more difficult in some ways than slavery, because it implies responsibilities. "The future is not guaranteed," she said.

Osman identified a "window of opportunities" for women. They were a very big part of the protests, and now they have to insist "to be involved in the draft of the constitution, they have to make sure that they are in every important committee," she told IPS - especially when the constitutional committee "doesn't have any women yet".

"We will have very tough times now" to establish democracy, she acknowledged. People must unite, demand dignity, respect, and freedom – political, social and religious. "That's when you realise democracy," she concluded.

The newly launched U.N. Women has an important role to play to ensure that women have a place at the decision-making table. The agency is reformulating its programmes in Tunisia and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East to include these new opportunities, said Moez Doraid, deputy executive director of U.N. Women.

"Gains and victories have been achieved at the political, societal and gender levels," he affirmed. "[We] need to sustain the benefits…and be vigilant to avoid reversal."

One way to achieve this is the use of affirmative action and quotas, he added.

According to Osman, U.N. Women needs to focus on civil society women's organisations, "reflecting the aspirations, the themes, and the beauty of women, politically speaking."

She stressed to IPS the real challenge now is to ensure that this new U.N. entity will do what it has promised: prioritising women. It was "brought by women, and it should be for women," she said.

(END)

Q&A: "Education Must Reach the Marginalised"

Myurvet S. Mehmed interviews IRINA BOKOVA, Director-General of UNESCO

UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova

Credit:UN Photo/Mark Garten


UNITED NATIONS, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) - Although more girls are enrolling in school - notably in countries with the greatest gender gaps like Chad, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen - two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are still women.

This has very real consequences for every aspect of life. For example, a child born to a mother who can read is 50 percent more likely to survive past age five, says Irina Bokova, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Speaking with IPS on the occasion of the historic launch of UN Women Thursday, Bokova stressed that issues surrounding women's and children's education impact nearly all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), from improved health and prevention of HIV/AIDS to higher income.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are UNESCO's global priorities in helping U.N. member states achieve education for all by 2015, the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS)? And do you think this is achievable?

A: As our Global Monitoring Report being released on Mar. 1 shows, there has been impressive progress in the past decade. An additional 52 million children enrolled in primary school. The number of children out of school was halved in South and West Asia. A number of countries that started the decade with large gender gaps have achieved gender parity in primary education.

These are achievements that are the result of strong political commitment, sustained domestic spending on education and policies that have made education more accessible. But as our annual report warns, this progress is slowing.

In our programmes, we place a special focus on improving teacher recruitment and training policies because 1.9 million teachers are needed just to reach universal primary education by 2015; on literacy because close to 800 million adults are illiterate, on skills for the world of work and on helping governments manage their education systems.

The greatest challenge education systems face is to reach the marginalised, to make sure that students acquire relevant knowledge and skills to cope in today's globalised world, together with values and attitudes that promote dialogue, responsible citizenship and peace.

Q: Do you think that a quality education for girls can help strengthen the international agenda on development and peace?

A: The education of girls and women is indeed the key to development and peace. The fact that two-thirds of illiterate adults are women reflects the injustice of unequal access to education. Societies pay a heavy price for this.

A child born to a mother who can read is 50 percent more likely to survive past age five. In sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 1.8 million children's lives could have been saved in 2008 of their mothers had at least secondary education. Women with post-primary education are five times more likely than illiterate women to be knowledgeable about HIV and AIDS prevention.

Education gives a voice, encourages political participation, and increases opportunities on the labour market. There can be no equitable and just society without achieving gender equality, and this begins with education.

Q: What are the real challenges of getting girls into schools? Are these due to political, financial, social or cultural problems?

A: You have to start early. Being born a girl in many countries can still mean exclusion from education. Poverty is a number one obstacle. But there are others of a more social and cultural nature.

Living in a remote area, belonging to an indigenous community, speaking a minority language, carrying a disability all put girls at even greater risk of exclusion. These obstacles are not immovable and experience proves it. From Bangladesh to Senegal, many countries starting from a low base have reached gender parity in primary education.

The first step is to abolish school fees and make sure that there are no hidden costs such as books or uniforms that prevent girls from going to school. Financial subsidies to the poorest families, stipend and scholarship programmes are all policies that have enabled girls to successfully complete their schooling. Programs targeting the very young – under age six – are particularly effective in combating disadvantage.

Recruiting and training female teachers has an impact on school performance, especially in low-income countries. Where we really must put more concerted effort is at the secondary level because girls are more likely to drop out than boys for a whole set of reasons. Cost of schooling is one, but there are also concerns about safety, hygiene and long distances to and from school. Finally, we have to build a gender-sensitive culture in schools: this means breaking stereotypes, and encouraging girls to have aspirations and pursue them.

Q: Lack of education is clearly one of the hidden costs of conflict and violence.

A: Our report being released on Mar. 1 documents the devastating consequences of armed conflict on education. The alarming situation demands a strong and concerted global response. We must address failures of protection through better monitoring and reporting of attacks targeting education systems and sanctioning these egregious violations of human rights.

This report puts the spotlight on misplaced priorities. Twenty-one developing countries are currently spending more on arms than on primary schools. If they were to cut military spending, they could put an additional 9.5 million children in school.

Finally, our role as an international community is to unlock education's potential to nurture peace, to support the development of inclusive education systems that reach out to all groups and that teach human rights and civic values. This is the path to reconciliation and peace.

Q: Have UNESCO's priorities been affected by a decline in financial contributions caused by the global economic crisis?

A: The financial and economic crisis puts all international organisations before the challenge of reforming deeply and swiftly. I was elected to the post of director-general in the midst of the crisis. Reform is the mainstay of my agenda - a reform that makes us more efficient, more visible and more effective. We have to do more with less – this is the reality.

I am doing this through streamlining a number of our programmes to sharpen their focus, by strengthening our network of field offices, by cutting administrative costs, by improving information and knowledge management.

UNESCO has a unique mandate. I have spoken above about our commitment to education and to advancing gender equality. But we are the United Nations agency dealing with the protection of cultural heritage, with promoting freedom of expression, with advancing scientific cooperation.

(END)

UN Women Celebrates Launch as Leading Player in Gender Equality

Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director of the newly-created UN Women.





UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24, 2011 (IPS) - After years of planning, fundraising and consultations, U.N. Women was officially launched Thursday evening to much celebration.

Drawing luminaries from every realm of the international community, as well as the entertainment, politics, media and film industries, the event was in keeping with the historic moment that U.N. Women marks.

Formally known as the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, U.N. Women combines four pre-existing U.N. agencies into one task force that embodies the highest ambitions and aspirations of the drivers of gender equality.

From grassroots organisations in far-flung corners of the world, to top-level diplomats, and everyone in-between, U.N. Women was saluted as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put an end to gender discrimination, and all its odious expressions and manifestations, throughout the world.

"For the first time in history women at the United Nations will have a seat on all the major decision-making bodies within the UN," Kathy Peach, chair of the Gender and Development Network Working Group on U.N. Women, and head of external affairs of VSO UK, told IPS.

"So for the first time women will have a place at the highest level on bodies such as U.N. AIDS," she added.

"Additionally, if U.N. Women gets the money it needs, it will be able to run programmes that tackle all the issues that we know are important to women, including ending violence against women, pushing for women's increased political participation, and creating opportunities for women to earn an income," Peach concluded.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has been a staunch supporter of U.N. Women since its seeds were sown some years ago.

"With the birth of U.N. Women, we welcome a powerful new agent for progress on gender equality and women's empowerment," Ban said.

"The challenges are great, but I believe that with the new energy, the new momentum and the new authority that U.N. Women brings, these challenges will be met. True gender equality should be our shared legacy in the 21st Century," he added.

Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet was brought on board by Ban as the first executive director of U.N. Women. A long-time champion of gender equality and women's rights, Bachelet emphasised that the establishment of U.N. Women reflects a long history of frustration with the slow pace of change.

She noted that U.N. Women was voted into existence unanimously by the 192-member General Assembly following years of advocacy by a spectrum of women's rights advocates including activists, organisers, lawyers, health professionals, and artists.

"Think of how much more we can do once women are fully empowered as active agents of change and progress within their societies," Bachelet said. "Historically, we are at a point of great potential and change for women. Now we must seize that opportunity." She added, "My own experience has taught me that there is no limit to what women can do."

Despite much-deserved celebration, U.N. Women cannot afford to lose a minute in getting down to solid work. Even on the day of the launch, the organisation's funding remains dismally low – the pledges for 2011 total a mere 55 million dollars, a fraction of what is needed to ensure the agency's smooth take-off.

NGOs that have supported and guided the formation of U.N. Women for years are anxious that the massive shortfall in funding will hinder U.N. Women's trajectory even before it has a chance to soar, and have been pushing the governments in their respective countries to hugely step up their funding efforts.

VSO UK and Oxfam, two development NGOs that are incredibly invested in the success of U.N. Women, released a report Wednesday called the 'Blueprint for U.N. Women', which details the results of a comprehensive survey that polled the opinions of grassroots women's groups, leaders and activists from over 25 countries on their hopes and expectations of the new agency.

According to the report, an overwhelming majority of women believe that ending violence against women must be the first and most urgent priority of U.N. Women. A huge percent of those polled also expressed the opinion that U.N. organisations on the ground have hitherto been constrained by ties to national governments, and were unfamiliar with the situation on the ground.

All this must change if U.N. Women is to bypass the flaws and pitfalls of its predecessors.

"We hope that U.N. Women can learn from the lessons of past agencies - but this would mean that U.N. Women has to go into countries and talk to local civil society organizations at country-level," Farah Karimi, Executive Director, Oxfam Novib, told IPS, stressing that the Blueprint should guide and instruct U.N. Women as it moves forward.

The splendor of the launch, graced by the presence of eminent persons from royalty to celebrities, only serves to solidify the critique that high-level discussions and global policy will not be enough to bring U.N. Women's dreams to fruition.

More important than ever are women's voices from the global south, from those places in the world so wracked by destitution and violence that the pomp of events such as these cannot even be imagined.

(END)

UN Reports on Women's Status

United Nations Millennium Campaign - Goal 3 - Gender Equity

PERU: Popular Women Vote-Catchers Stand in for Real Participation

Cenaida Uribe (in red) with members of congressional women's caucus.

Credit:Courtesy Congress of Peru




LIMA, Feb 7, 2011 (IPS) - Women candidates nominated for the presidential and legislative elections in Peru in April tend to be big names in the worlds of sports, television or show business, or are following family tradition. But political parties are failing to promote meaningful participation by women in politics.

There are two women among the 11 presidential hopefuls seeking to succeed President Alan García on Jul. 28. In the 2006 elections, there were three women running for president.

A third woman, Mercedes Araoz of the governing Partido Aprista Peruano (PAP), resigned her candidacy because her party would not honour her demand that persons under investigation for corruption be excluded from the party slates.

Keiko Fujimori, at present running third in the polls, is the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who is running her election campaign from prison where he is serving 25 years for crimes against humanity and corruption.

Juliana Reymer, a former street vendor who now runs her own small business, became the candidate of the small centrist Fuerza Nacional party when its previous nominee left the party to support former president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006), who is the front-runner in the polls.

"These presidential and congressional elections are a disgrace," Rosa María Alfaro, head of Calandria, an organisation promoting women's political participation, told IPS. "Male arrogance is the basis of even Keiko Fujimori's campaign, because she depends on her father. There is a kind of gender dependence."

Alfaro also criticised the way political parties have drawn up their lists of candidates for the next Congress, to be elected for a five-year term in April. By law, at least 30 percent of the candidates must be women.

But to meet the quotas, parties have recruited prominent women from other walks of life, rather than training and promoting their own women members. Since the 1990s, "outsiders" and flash-in-the-pan candidates have held an attraction for Peruvian voters.

Former showgirl and television presenter July Pinedo, a 1990s sex symbol, is on the congressional candidate list for the centre-right PAP.

According to local media, Alberto Fujimori personally drew up the congressional list for the right-wing Fuerza 2011, formally headed by his daughter. The list of candidates includes Gina Pacheco, his personal nurse and a frequent visitor to his prison cell, and Leyla Chihuán, the captain of the national women's team for volleyball, a popular sport in Peru.

And at the top of the list for Toledo's centre-right Perú Posible party is 1980s volleyball star Cecilia Tait, while soap opera actress Ebelin Ortiz is also a candidate.

The right-wing alliance Cambio Radical, meanwhile, has nominated former starlet Daysi Ontaneda, frequently featured in the gossip columns.

The head of Asociación Civil Transparencia, Percy Medina, told IPS that in a study on female political participation carried out by his organisation, women political leaders and activists complained of "arbitrary decisions" by male leaders who impose "media personalities with no political experience instead of active members of organisations" as party candidates.

In the survey of women leaders and activists from five different political parties, all of the respondents emphasised the lack of a level playing field between men and women in terms of access to leadership posts and candidate nominations, Medina said.

In his opinion, "a culture of machismo which hinders women from achieving a more decisive role" is behind this inequality and explains the profusion of actresses and sportswomen on candidate lists, instead of experienced women politicians.

"The perception is that women's participation in Peruvian politics has slid backwards," even though women presidential or congressional candidates are now quite common, said Medina.

Alfaro predicted that the April elections will not resemble the November 2010 regional and municipal polls, when two women battled it out for the post of mayor of Lima. The winner was Susana Villarán, a moderate left-winger, and her rival was Lourdes Flores, a conservative.

Both women had been presidential candidates in earlier elections and had recognised track records as politicians when they stood for the key position of mayor of the capital. "Their proposals were well developed and were debated in the media and among the general public," said Alfaro. "It was a campaign and a democratic contest truly led by women."

Alfaro, an expert on communications and gender, said the presidential candidates and Alberto Fujimori are using popular women as vote-catchers, at a time when ideology is weak and personal conflicts are rampant in political parties, and male politicians are desperate to win at any cost.

For instance, Luis Castañeda, the presidential candidate for the populist Solidaridad Nacional, placed second in the polls, chose as his vice presidential running mate Carmen Núñez, the estranged wife of a millionaire businessman and provincial mayor who supports a different presidential candidate.

Lisbeth Guillén of the Manuela Ramos women's movement agreed that Peru's political parties "do not truly encourage women's participation," in spite of the fact that in opinion polls voters say they want to see more women active in politics and are sympathetic to the potential prospect of a woman president.

Guillén pointed out that electoral quotas for women are enshrined in the Peruvian constitution, and that thanks to this, the number of women in Congress has increased steadily. The outgoing parliament (2006-2011) has 35 women lawmakers, equivalent to 29 percent of the seats, compared to 26 women in the 2000-2006 legislature, and 14 in 1995-2000.

The activist said political parties nominate crowd-pleasing personalities who can attract a large number of votes because they must secure at least five percent of the national vote in elections in order to maintain their official registration.

However, she said voters have another way to make their voices heard: the so-called "preferential vote," which allows voters to select candidates on congressional lists according to their own preference, thus changing the order of the candidates pre-established by the parties.

Cenaida Uribe, president of the congressional women's caucus, offered another viewpoint on women's presence in parliament. A former volleyball player for Peru, she belongs to the nationalist Gana Perú party led by former presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, in fourth place in the polls.

"Every one deserves an opportunity to make a contribution," she told IPS. Artists, for example, can promote laws on cultural affairs, and she as a sportswoman has been able to push for laws that favour sports. "Newcomers to Congress who have no political experience should not be under-estimated," she said.

In her view, the legislative term that ends in July "has been exceptional," because for the first year Congress was presided over by a woman speaker, all the commissions have included women, and "indigenous women, coca-growing peasant women, Afro-Peruvian women and low-income women are represented in parliament."

But Uribe, who is black, stressed that in spite of these positive aspects, "there is still too much machismo in Congress, which cuts women off from access to the democratic decision-making process." (END)

Exploring 'Turkishness': women’s rights, entrepreneurship and ethno-religious identity - Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review

ZEYNEP DERELİ
The modern Turkish Republic was founded as a secular democracy. As we are approaching the centennial of the founding of the Republic we can see how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.

We still face significant issues regarding human rights, particularly in relation to minorities and women. Turkey still struggles with defining what a “minority” is, and falls short in offering equal rights and opportunities to individuals who are not part of the mainstream but are no less deserving of respect—particularly its Kurdish, Armenian, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.

Even for “mainstream” Turks, vital rights like freedom of expression, media and religion are withheld from individuals in the slippery interests of concepts like “insulting Turkishness.” And although women are not absent from the top ranks of Turkish businesses, schools, and government, Turkey still suffers from a widening gender gap. The female participation rate in the work force is actually lower than it was twenty years ago, despite the fact that more women are going to school.

The long arc of our Republic’s history has tended not toward being a “European” country merely in name, but toward being a democratic country in form and spirit. As we know, gender equality, the driving force behind development, is one of the main missions of Europe. Although Turkey’s legal code is now largely in accordance with the EU acquis communitaire, unfortunately, the influence of more traditional cultures, particularly along ethnic and religious lines, is a large obstacle to women’s empowerment in general.

Ultimately, to unleash Turkey’s true potential, we must aggressively pursue gender equity in all aspects of Turkish society. Doing this requires a comprehensive strategy that includes strengthening women’s education and employment rights and performance, removing discrimination in society through culturally sensitive initiatives, incubating gender equality by developing visible role models and adapting actions to closely monitored and measured progress. Success stories in achieving gender equality around the world point to promising models that can be employed immediately. Empowering women is the best way to enable development.

To understand the challenges facing women in Turkey, an examination of the gender gap in education and employment is an essential starting point. Despite vast improvements, Turkey still suffers from a large gender gap in education. Although the adult female literacy rate has risen from 66 percent to 80 percent in the last twenty years, adult male literacy is still 16 points higher. The gender gap is 4 percentage points for primary school enrollment rates, and twice that for secondary school enrollment. And the gap widens in rural areas where traditional gender discrimination is at its strongest. Furthermore, although 45 percent of university degrees were awarded to women in 2005, this number is projected to drop to 37 percent by 2025.

When inequality starts with education it continues for a lifetime, as exemplified by Turkey’s gender gap in employment. Over the last two decades, the rate has dropped from 34 percent to 26.4 percent, which is much less than the OECD average of 43.6 percent. Turkey ranks last in the OECD, trailing Mexico whose rate is 37.6 percent. It also trails the Middle Eastern and North African average of 32 percent.

Detrimentally, like education and employment, women’s entrepreneurship lags in Turkey. Women entrepreneurs in Turkey share many of the same motivations as their counterparts elsewhere: to create solutions to problems in their markets, societies and lives. They aspire to exploit innovative ideas, to get out of “no point” jobs, to become independent or self-employed, to work flexible hours, to increase their mobility and to leverage their skills.

However, Turkish women are more likely than their foreign counterparts to pursue entrepreneurship out of boredom or, more importantly, economic necessity. In one study, one in six said entrepreneurship was a means to escape the boredom of being housewives. And the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that one third of female entrepreneurs in Turkey are motivated by necessity (rather than opportunity), a rate far higher than every other country studied except Serbia.

Various factors in Turkey impede women’s entrepreneurship (and women’s employment in general), including a lack of adequate political representation, a lack of adequate access to markets and marketing, to credit and financing and control of resources and property, discrimination in recruiting and in the workplace, insufficient social services like childcare, and the ill-preparation of girls entering the workforce as a result of the education gap. But the last reason may be the most elusive: the failure to cultivate a spirit of equal rights among women. Cultivating a “spirit” is truly a cultural question.

Unfortunately, Turkey has no overarching strategy for developing female empowerment. However, from this brief discussion we can see what might be good pillars for such a strategy. In order to strengthen women’s education and employment rights and performance, we should invest in a broad range of women’s education, training, and social services.

In order to remove discrimination in society through culturally sensitive initiatives we should continuously investigate issues in women’s empowerment, including the interplay of culture, religion, and ethnicity. Furthermore, major stakeholders, such as family men, business associations, unions, political parties, and universities, must be included as a part of the solution. Finally, interventions are needed to fight negative discrimination and employ positive discrimination by enacting and enforcing appropriate laws.

In order to incubate women’s employment and develop visible role models, we should start by encouraging women’s employment at all levels, creating support networks and removing as many obstacles as possible; in addition to inspiring women’s employment by creating more visibility for successful female business leaders. And in order to adapt our actions to closely monitored and measured progress we should review progress regarding women’s empowerment through thorough, regular reporting and key indicators.

Achieving gender equality, given all the challenges facing women, is no easy task. But by developing a visible, comprehensive, culturally sensitive, locally executed, and adaptable strategy that supports women at all stages of the lifecycle we can achieve a goal far loftier than equal pay for equal work: we can enable women to empower themselves.

Achieving understanding and cooperation is no easy task as it requires a set of common, consistently applied liberal democratic principles that transcend the boundaries that threaten to divide us – general, geographic, cultural, economic, educational, linguistic and sectarian.

It also requires not merely tolerating differences between people and peoples, but respecting and appreciating those differences. And finally, it requires committed domestic and international initiatives.

At home, Turkey needs to work much harder to unify its people, not around an ethno-religious notion of “Turkishness,” but around the values, rights, responsibilities and privileges of being a citizen of Turkey.

Abroad, Turkey must work harder to drive common understandings and to support common principles and values, particularly with the West, rather than simply boasting of stronger ties with the Middle East.

In the end, how we achieve gender equity, one of the basic tenets of unity within diversity, is much less about passing the necessary laws in compliance with EU acquis than it is about transforming society.

Turkey will not only develop greatly, but will also be a strong force for development elsewhere, if it can achieve gender equity around these shared values. In so doing, we can hope for a Turkey that is democratic, secular, strong, peaceful and creative and that works toward harmony and peace in the international arena.

* Zeynep Dereli, director of the Atlantic Council's Black Sea Energy and Economic Forum, is also a senior research associate at the United Kingdom-based Foreign Policy Centre, which published the full version of this article, as part of the series 'Exploring Turkishness.'

UGANDA: ICT Boom for Economy, A Bust for Some Women

By Rosebell Kagumire

Women at workshop on ICTs and violence against women in Namaingo: conflict over access and privacy is common in Uganda.

Credit: Susan Kinzi/IPS





KAMPALA, Nov 25, 2010 (IPS) - The rapid growth of the ICT market in Uganda has been greeted with optimism over its potential to boost the country’s development. But less attention is being paid to the increase in gender based violence due to the use of information and communications technology.

Uganda has one of the fastest-growing ICT markets in the East Africa region, with mobile phone use in particular expanding quickly. Mobile phone penetration stood at 32.8 percent with 10.7 million subscribers in 2009. According to a recent report by Pyramid Research, the numbers should double to 20.9 million in 2015. The increase in mobile subscription is expected to also increase internet access. Presently just 1 in 10 Ugandans has access to the internet.

But the rapid adoption of mobiles has also seen a rise in invasion of privacy through SMS stalking, monitoring and control of partners’ whereabouts.

Anecdotal reports are backed by a new study, which found that the majority of ICT users have had conflicts within their families.

The study, by Aramanzan Madanda from Makerere University’s Department of Gender and Women Studies, found that about 46 percent of people had problems with spouses in relation to use of mobile phones and 16 percent reported having conflicts over use of computers.

These conflicts arose over issues of freedom and control. According to the research, conducted in two districts of Iganga and Mayuge from 2007-2010, the majority of victims of violence are women.

"Women reported physical violence while most men report psychological violence," said Madanda, who also sits on the Uganda women’s caucus on ICT, hosted by Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET).

The research shows that communities are having difficulties coming to terms with the power of technology to bring about freedom for women.

"Traditionally, in Busoga (one of the study sites), a woman must seek her spouse’s consent to go anywhere, whether to visit a relative or go to the market," Madanda explained. "But now women can be directly in touch with relatives and other people without their husband’s consent and since men have lost that power to control the women some turn to violence."

Women often have to tell men who they are calling and who called them.

"And because of low literacy levels among women, they only know how to call. Most don’t know about safety features on phone or have any idea that their partners can view called numbers or read sent messages. They don’t use security codes," the report says.

In some families, conversations must be on loudspeaker so that everyone knows who called you and what you are talking about.

The intrusion of women’s privacy using ICTs has also been exacerbated by women’s economic dependence on men.

The research found that the majority of people who have mobile phones are men. Eighty-eight percent of original buyers were men, while only 44 percent of the women had bought their phones. This means about 56 percent of women who own phones got them from someone else, usually from the husband or partner.

"The freedom lies in the purchasing power," says Madanda.

Madanda's study forms part of a growing awareness and acknowledgement of the darker side of the ICT boom in Uganda. In April, Uganda enacted the Domestic Violence Act, which for the first time acknowledges the link between the use of ICTs and domestic violence.

Under the law, repeated sending of abusive messages and calls to another person is regarded as an offense that can fetch a two-year jail term.

But of concern are Ugandan cyber laws, which pay limited attention to gender in general and none at all to gender-based violence.

"Only the Electronic Signatures Bill has one direct reference to females in section 86 (4), which is in respect to a search warrant for suspected offenders," says a report by Goretti Zavuga Amuriat of WOUGNET.

The report says Uganda’s cyber laws are pre-occupied with e-government, e-commerce and data protection and the bills remain quite oblivious to the social and gender context.

"Most actors in the ICT industries are preoccupied with expansion and profit without much emphasis on the ramifications on gender based violence resulting from adoption," said Madanda.

WOUGNET has trained women and rights advocates on how to use ICTs and also how to minimize the negative effects.

Through a programme aimed at strengthening women’s strategic use of ICTs to combat violence against women and girls, activists, service providers and women rights advocates have been given practical skills to ensure privacy.

"There have been successes. The women we trained now use mobile phones to report cases on domestic violence and other violence against women, although the ICTs available to most women in the fight against VAW are still very limited," said Maureen Agena, a New Media trainer with WOUGNET.

Through campaigns like Take Back the Tech, the organisation has been successful in raising awareness of violence against women in Uganda through use of short message services (SMS). But how to address the violence that arises from use of ICTs remains to be tackled. The majority of mobile phone users are men and illiteracy is still a big challenge.

So ICTs can create jobs, reduce isolation of women but they still have a limitation as a tool for women’s empowerment. We still have attitudes towards women’s freedom. The poorest of the poor are women and they haven’t been reached with ICT in Uganda," says Madanda.

(END)

COLOMBIA: New Boost for Rural Women

COLOMBIA
By Helda Martínez

Ángela Orozco in her garden, in bad shape due to the unusually long, heavy rainy season.
Credit: Helda Martínez/ IPS

BOGOTA, Dec 15, 2010 (IPS) - "It sounds nice, but it’ll be tough to implement"; "the most important thing is to translate into reality": These statements by rural women leaders in Colombia sum up the reaction of activists to the government’s decision to revive and refinance a special fund for projects in the countryside led by women.

The scepticism has deep roots in a country where the rural population has been devastated by five decades of armed conflict, which has displaced millions of small farmers, and where rural women are marginalised and made invisible by a patriarchal system.

In addition, government projects aimed at supporting farmers have typically ended up benefiting large landowners.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Juan Camilo Restrepo announced that the government would allocate 850,000 dollars to rural women’s initiatives in 2011, to begin redressing the neglect they have faced from the state.

The funds will be channeled through the Rural Women’s Development Fund (FOMMUR), which has been left without financing over the last four years.

The funds aimed at bolstering women’s participation in agriculture form part of a number of government initiatives, including the creation or revival of programmes, aimed at developing the rural sector in Colombia.

"The more than eight-year-old Law on Rural Women has not even been codified yet," Restrepo complained. "Public policies to benefit rural women lack institutional development and there is a lack of coordination among the different state agencies involved," he added, in an assessment in line with the complaints of associations of small women farmers.

"To make this change a reality, it is important to take into account the fact that rural women face a number of disadvantages characteristic of patriarchal societies," Yulieth Tamayo, a member of the Colectivo de Mujeres Pazíficas, a group of women activists in the western agricultural province of Valle del Cauca, told IPS.

One reflection of this "patriarchal society" is that land is registered in the names of women’s husbands, fathers or brothers.

Another hurdle that disproportionately affects women is the requirement that farmers wishing to obtain government funds or credit must present a number of documents, for which they must travel to the nearest large city, or "even to Bogota" - - which is especially difficult, if not impossible, for women with young children, Tamayo explained.

To make opportunities for farmers more equally available to women, "projects for cultural and educational changes, as well as mechanisms for oversight of how funds are handled," are needed, she argued.

"The announcement is fabulous, but they also have to offer support and advice on how to best use the funds," said Ángela Orozco, a farmer in Usme, a rural area at the southern edge of greater Bogota.

Orozco, who comes from a peasant family displaced from the northwestern province of Antioquia by the armed conflict, puts great stock in preserving the customs and traditional farming methods of her forebears, and combines her work in the countryside with her profession as a schoolteacher.

In the gardens surrounding her house, she grows uchuva fruit (Cape gooseberry), onions, fennel, marigolds, beets, lettuce, cilantro and camomile, for her family’s consumption and for sale in nearby farmers markets.

And in Ciudad Bolívar, a poor neighbourhood strung along the hills on the south side of the Colombian capital that is mainly home to people displaced from rural areas by the civil war, she promotes the cultivation of fresh produce in child care centres and preschools, where children not only learn farming skills but grow food for their own meals.

Orozco believes that peasant farmers, especially women, must be empowered to take on leadership roles, as the only way for them to leave behind their longstanding neglect by the authorities and victimisation by different armed groups.

Over the last half century, the rural population in this South American nation has been largely abandoned by the state and has suffered the effects of an armed conflict that has basically been waged in rural areas, where the state security forces fight left-wing guerrillas.

But even before the emergence of the main insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in 1964, the countryside was caught up in the violence between the conservative and liberal parties, and later in the crossfire between not only the insurgents and the army, but also far- right paramilitaries, drug cartels and traffickers of emeralds.

And one of the main objectives of the conflict has been possession of land.

The result: one of the largest and most silent rural exoduses in the recent history of the world. Since 1985, some 3.3 million people in this country of 44 million have been forced off their land and deprived of at least two million hectares.

In 1950, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas, compared to 26 percent -- 11.7 million people -- today, according to projections based on the 2005 census.

But although women and girls represent over half of the rural population (51 percent), "their significant contribution to the national economy, and to the country’s food sovereignty in particular," is ignored, says Infogénero, a local NGO that mobilises women peasant farmers in defence of their rights and against machista and other kinds of violence.

Restrepo, who was named agriculture minister by President Juan Manuel Santos, in office since August, said women must be taken into account because of "their business sense, their sense of austerity, their ability and inclination to save, and the priority they put on the needs of their families."

He also underlined that women in general are better at paying off loans, and "have a greater sense of community," which means that protecting their economic and social rights has a valuable multiplier effect.

But on her farm, Orozco, like other farmers, remains sceptical. "Governments don’t care about peasants, which was proven by what happened with the AIS: they left the peasant farmers without funds," she said.

She was referring to the scandal over the government's Agro Ingreso Seguro (AIS –"stable farm income") programme, in which farm subsidies and soft loans for farmers ended up in the hands of wealthy landowners, under right-wing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

The ongoing investigation of the corruption scandal has found that from 2007 to 2009, government funds allocated to large landowners were 27 times greater than what went to peasant farmers, 70 percent of whom live in poverty.

The beneficiaries of the AIS programme included agribusiness producers of cut flowers, palm oil, bananas and sugar cane, and transnational corporations like Coltabaco, Philip Morris’s affiliate in Colombia, which received 16.5 billion dollars in credit.

"The AIS programme will now be at the service of small and medium-size farmers," Minister Restrepo promised. "And we are working hard to make micro-credit a tangible reality for the rural sector."

He also predicted that "the big beneficiaries of this refocusing (of government farm policies) will be young rural entrepreneurs, and women who live and work in the country’s rural areas." (IPS/LA DV IP AG BO HU WO/TRASP-SW/HM/EG/10) (END)

POLITICS: Women's Representation Key to Development

NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 16, 2010 - Research has shown that women account for more than half of the population of any country. This is reflected in the 2010 Census results, where there are slightly more women than men in Kenya.

However, this large population of women is invisible in key decision-making processes, particularly in governance - at both local and national level. Even though the trend is slowly changing in Kenya and there are now more women in the current Parliament than there have ever been, there is still a need for more women in political leadership.

Of the 222 Members of Parliament, only 22 are women - with only 16 having been elected and 6 nominated. Since 2003 when the number of women stood at 18, there has been a notable positive change in how various ministries conduct business.

The need for an engendered process cannot be over-emphasised due to the fact that men and women leaders have been known to have varying political interests, and consequently different practical strategic needs. "At the policy level, we have seen various gender responsive laws such as the Sexual Offences Act of 2006 introduced in parliament by a sitting female MP, Hon Njoki Ndung’u. There is also the Children’s Act of 2002, Employment Act of 2007, Political Parties Act of 2007.The significance of these pieces of legislation in seeking gender equality and equity is important," explains Kakuvi Njoka, a Lawyer in Tharaka-Nithi County, Eastern region of Kenya.

The Employment Act, as well as the Political Parties Act, looks into key issues of gender representation in the socio-economic and political arena. They are geared towards promoting equal participation by both men and women and to discourage practices that are gender discriminative.

"Both Acts provide a minimum threshold of the number of women, since they are the marginalised gender that should be considered in both employment and in political parties. They therefore speak to the Presidential Decree that stated that there should be at least 30 percent of women representation in all public offices," Jane Malika, a gender activist in Nairobi, explains

"With the introduction of the Women’s Fund, a micro finance kitty, more women are now able to access loans from the government but after having been taken through various levels of capacity building," explains Dan Maingi, an accountant in Kiambu County, Central Kenya.

The introduction of live coverage of Parliament has also shown a paradigm shift in the direction that debates in Parliament have taken and other policies that have resulted from these debates such as the Sessional Paper No 2 of 2006 on Gender Equality and Development, National Land Policy, National Reproductive and Health Policy, Gender Policy in Education of 2007 and the National Policy for the Abandonment of Female Genital Mutilation (2008- 2012).

Through the urging of female MPs, in 2007 the government committed itself to set aside close to 125 thousand dollars to address a fundamental problem. It had been noted that female pupils and students, particularly in rural areas where the population is more afflicted with poverty, would be absent from school for five days in a month due to a lack of sanitary towels. This translates to two months of not attending school in one academic year.

A recent study conducted by the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) and the Division of Reproductive Health, Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation shows that sanitary towels are not always available and girls from slums suffer the most.

This public discussion of a topic that was previously taboo due to the conservative nature of the society, has led to well-wishers making donations towards ensuring that girls do not stay out of school due to a lack of sanitary towels.

Imperative to note is also the process of Constitutional Review that recently saw Kenya promulgate a new Constitution. "In 2008, the then Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Hon Martha Karua, begun to relentlessly push for a time-table that would guide the review of the Constitution. Together with other female MPs she also ensured that the review process was gender sensitive," explains Jennifer Massis, a politician and former Parliamentary aspirant.

This can be reflected in the organisation of the Committee of Experts mandated with the task of drafting the Constitution, as well as some of the Clauses within the document which include the Affirmative Action Clause which stipulates that at least a third of either gender should be represented in various elective positions.

Although having more women in leadership positions does not necessarily translate into gender equality, women’s active participation in decision- making is essential. (END)