What's On African Women's Minds?

A Conversation with WILDAF director Joanna Foster

During the Commission on the Status of Women's preparatory meeting for the June Beijing review at the United Nations, WomensWire editor, Anaga Dalal, sat down with Joanna Foster, Executive Director of the Harare, Zimbabwe-based "Women in Law and Development in Africa" (WILDAF). Foster highlighted the challenges and opportunities awaiting African women as the June review approaches.

WomensWire (WW): What has been the greatest challenge for African women as the June review approaches?

Joanna Foster (JF): Many African women's activists have not been able to come to the U.N. because of a lack of funding. As a result, those of us who are here have been over-worked and frazzled as we try to represent the interests and issues of women from an entire continent.

WW: What issues are African women most concerned about?

JF: There have been several specific issues of concern to us. One is the role of women in decision making and power sharing. Though there has been a lot of rhetoric, we haven't gotten very far even though there have been some tremendous steps forward. For example, in South Africa there is a very good affirmative action program that has resulted in the election of a record number of women in Parliament. And in Namibia, there has been an increase in the number of women in Parliament and on the local governmental level.

The second area of concern is the effect of globalization on the development of women. Globalization has led to structural adjustment programs that have hurt women by taking away a lot of social service programs once provided by governments. These services are now being privatized. And these new agencies are limiting their reach by attaching a lot of special conditions to the aid. For example, the first thing that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund did was to ask Zimbabwe to limit its spending before they provided assistance. In turn, the first thing that the Zimbabwean government cut was spending on education, health and agricultural extensions for rural women. Now rural women are becoming even further impoverished. In fact the feminization of poverty is having a huge impact in Africa.

The other area of concern has been armed conflict. As you can imagine, in the throes of conflict, all development is stopped and there's no progress for women. This is an area of massive concern. Women's human rights are being abused and violated everyday. And the violations are not just rape and being forced into a life of exile. These conflicts are also affecting women who have tried to build something since Beijing but have seen all of their progress nullified by the fighting. All their work has been lost.

WW: At the same time, however, women in conflict ridden zones like the Sudan have made tremendous progress through their work in exile in neighboring Kenya.

JF: Yes, the "Sudanese Women's Voice for Peace" is doing tremendous work but if the armed insurrection doesn't stop, what's the point of their work? If you look at a country like Uganda, which has had peace for quite some time, there is still fighting on the border between Uganda and Sudan with a large resistance force as well. These people are still abducting girls from schools and using them as slaves. The same thing holds true if you look at somewhere like Sierra Leone. This is also linked into this globalization process because our governments are spending lots of money on arms and armament which puts countries in vulnerable positions when it comes to meeting their people's needs. For instance, landmines had been meticulously mapped in Mozambique but the government didn't prioritize their removal because of the constant pall of war on the Continent. So, when there was a flood, all the land mines moved and the danger to people returned and the mapping process had to start again from scratch.

The next area of concern to African women is women's human rights. We are arguing that without women's human rights, development is not sustainable and without women's human rights, everything concerning globalization, access to health services, etc. is irrelevant. After all, if you think about violence and human rights, one has to realize that it's because women are being beaten and their human rights are being jeopardized that they're needing health assistance which isn't there anyway!

And women's human rights must also be in relation to economic rights so that a woman can earn her own money, control and own her own land, have access to it and be able to produce food and other daily necessities. Human rights for women are a very, very important starting point for all concerns before African women.

WW: Are you suggesting that women's human rights become a more integral part of a country's legal and political framework?

JF: Definitely. Without a framework that includes women's human rights, women's issues are relegated to the level of temporary programming. This is one of the main reasons all the money that has been used for development assistance hasn't come to much. If basic human rights for women aren't guaranteed, then we will not be able to access funding, health services, or education anyway. When patriarchy reigns supreme, there are structural inequalities and no such thing as progress. It's good and well to provide free primary education to young women but if there are deep-seated inequalities written into a country's framework, then there's little chance these women will actually make it to any school or point of progress. Girls in Africa often don't make it all the way through high school. They drop out for all sorts of reasons which are often tied in to social prejudices and inequalities.

WW: Can you talk about the tremendous gains women in Zimbabwe made by organizing the defeat of President Robert Mugabe's constitutional referendum?

JF: Women lobbied and went out into the heavily populated areas and also to the rural areas to explain to people that they can't vote "yes" to a constitution of that type because it's not in their interest.

WW: How has this affected Zimbabwean women's preparations for the June Beijing review?

JF: Yes, women gained a lot because of the defeat. The experience taught them about Constitutional process and what their rights are. Don't forget that in Zimbabwe we don't just have a male/female divide, we have the dimension of race and class in a much more extended form than in most African countries outside of South Africa and perhaps Namibia. Defeating this referendum also motivated women to put together something new that wasn't simply handed down from their colonial masters (the UK), so there was a lot of interest in it. In regards to preparing for Beijing, women's activists had recently completed their "16 days of Activism Against Gender Violence" campaign which highlighted the fact that this violence is a Constitutional issue.

When African women had a preparatory meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, one of the things that we found to be sorely missing in all African countries including Zimbabwe is the lack of Constitutional will to make sure that women's issues are addressed. Furthermore, Mugabe's referendum would have led to an obvious lack of governance that would not have led to the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action. That was another rallying point for women's activists in the region. When word spread that women were going to help review the new Constitution, we all said 'hurray, all these stupid things could be thrown out!' It was tremendous.

Women who had never spoken up before were participating in these Constitutional meetings. And it was also interesting that whenever the official review board of the Constitutional Committee fighting Mugabe's referendum went to address people, maybe ten people would have shown up. But when the women went out into the communities, they drew crowds of 100 or more so it was obvious that people were listening to the women. And on the day of the vote, everybody voted "no." I couldn't believe it. I was in South Africa at the time and I was sitting in front of the television watching all of these events unfold. I tell you, it was like a movie. It was very exciting.

WW: What progress have African women in general made at this year's preparatory meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women?

JF: The progress we have made has been in the area of HIV/AIDS. We managed to get the General Assembly to take up this issue. We're finding a strong nexus between discriminatory laws, cultural practices and religious beliefs and their impact on women's exposure to HIV/AIDS. This disease is actually wiping out an entire generation of women at a productive age when they can work, help develop the country and give birth to the next generation. But we African women still don't have enough delegates to follow negotiations all the way through to the end. Hence, the concerns of sub-Saharan Africa women, who are the hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, are lost.

WW: Why has it been so difficult to bring African women's concerns to the U.N.'s table?

JF: The U.N. negotiating block and the G-77, of which many African nations are a part, is so unwieldy with 134 countries participating in total. Of course, some of these countries have their own hidden agendas and there simply aren't enough people to stand up for African women's rights. Our missions are too small and over-worked as it is. Even if these missions bring back-up from their embassies in the capital, they can't always stay long enough to really make a difference in long drawn out negotiations. Ah, you know it's so frustrating!

WW: And does the problem of access to new technology play into your frustration?

JF: Yes, exactly. Exactly and we come to the U.N. with much less information than western based activists as a result. And if you are going to a G-77 meeting and there are 45 people there and only 2 of you are African women from Sub-saharan Africa with little information on everything that has happened so far, then hey you're in trouble!

And then on top of it all, we have the OIC within that group which is the Organization of Islamic Countries which includes some African countries like Sudan so that all the fantastic stuff that the Sudanese women are doing on peace, isn't validated by their government. I went in this morning and told a group of African women's activists that I don't think I want to participate in the U.N. meetings again because it's so frustrating. They said, 'You just wait, things will get better.'

And indeed, you never know with these negotiations because the same thing happened to me when activists were considering the optional protocol (a caveat to CEDAW that would allow women to complain directly to the U.N. about human rights abuses instead of going through their individual governments). The next year, in 1999, I came back despite my frustration and found a different group of people who all worked very hard to produce a reasonable document.

WW: Has the potential of the internet given you more hope?

JF: Yes, the internet is a big source of hope for us. WILDAF has a website which we manage from Zimbabwe which is why our group is a focal point that has been given the responsibility of disseminating information. And when we get back from the March PrepComm at the U.N., we'll be training women's activists from 26 countries on how to use and manage e-mail and the internet for advocacy. We have a training session scheduled for a week in South Africa between April 17th-25th.

WILDAF is a network so it's absolutely crucial that we can produce and disseminate a lot of information. We publish a newsletter, occasional papers on issues as well as collect information on what countries still have discriminatory laws towards women. We have to update this information all the time and put it up on the web so people can have access to it right away.

But getting access for African sisters to this information remains the problem. That's why we need to raise funds for hardware and software and God knows what!

What WILDAF is trying to do is raise enough funds to supply a basic computer, modem and telephone line to all our focal points in the 26 African countries where we work. And the Central Africans also want to be included so that's another seven countries. It is quite a challenge to raise these funds because phones and internet access are much more expensive in Africa. It's very difficult to convince a funder based in the West that what they pay $10 for, we pay $90 for.

But it's getting better. Five years ago, when I first went to WILDAF we barely used our e-mail account. Today, we send out e-mails everyday.

POSTED MARCH 8, 2000

Member states participating in the Economic Commission of Africa (ECA) held their most recent meeting in Addas Ababa, Ethiopia in November of last year. At that meeting governments discussed how to implement the Dakar Declaration and continue to ensure that the Platform for Action was being fully implemented. The meeting brought together participants from more than 40 African countries. In a statement by NGOs following the conference, regional policy trends in each of the twelve critical areas of the Platform for Action were identified. The NGO Coalition followed this up with an eleven point listing of obstacles to progress, citing the “lack of political will” by leaders of African governments as the primary stumbling block for women—and men—throughout the continent. The coalition went on to identify a lack of financial commitment to women’s rights programs by governments in the region as well as the scourge of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country and the brutal armed conflicts that continue to debilitate the continent.

The coalition went on to recommend two policy actions in each of the Platform’s twelve critical areas of concern. Some of the most innovative solutions include a call for the removal of user fees for basic health care services and support for the West African moratorium to stop the manufacture, importation and usage of small arms throughout the continent.

An NGO conference preceeding the formal ECA meeting stated a list of official objectives as the June review approaches. These include profiling African women’s activists, formulating a five year plan of action, establishing coordinating mechanisms at the national, sub-regional and regional levels and ensuring that governments be held accountable for their actions or lack of them.

Amongst the women’s groups working for the social, economic and cultural empowerment of African women is Flame, an online coalition of African women’s groups with a presence on the internet.