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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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