Of the 1.3 billion people who live in absolutely poverty around the globe, 70% are women. Women earn only 10% of the world’s income own less than 1 percent of the world’s property. This was said by Ms Lulu Xingwana, Minister of Women, Children and People with Disabilities.
Addressing the 5th International Women's Conference today in Bangalore, India, on the theme: “Empowering women through technology”, Minister Xingwana said: “Women make up two-thirds of the estimated 876 million adults worldwide who cannot read or write and girls make up 60% of the 77 million children not attending primary schools. Education is among the most important drivers of human development”.
She challenged delegates to focus on the education of girl children as an important process to promote gender equality and make investments in the future of women. “Poor access to schools and learning centres and the relatively high cost of education continue to be barriers for poor families to support the education of girls. In addition, unrelenting social prejudice against female education continues to be a major stumbling block to women empowerment and gender equality”.
Rural girls, she said, continued to face economic and social barriers to formal education and thus mighht not achieve their full potential as adults. “Hence, the situation calls for increased resources and intensified efforts to enhance female adult literacy in rural areas and empower rural women with technical information and knowledge to improve their health and participation in the increasingly complex world”. She added that information and communication technologies have the potential enhance the economic empowerment of women.
She pointed out that women were often the main repositories of vital indigenous knowledge system. Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS) has been shown to be an invaluable means by which to recover the knowledge of the inarticulate- women in particular- because these groups rarely leave written records of their knowledge, and as such they die with so inevitable a knowledge
“With regard to girl-children, South Africa’s Techno-Girl programme encourages thousands of girls to pursue careers in the field of science and technology. The programme has supported more than 4 500 girls to study Maths and Science and to pursue careers in Science and Technology in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Western Cape”, she said.
The programme targets dedicated learners from Grade 9 to 12 from disadvantaged communities. During the school holidays, these girls are placed with various companies, job shadowing business leaders in order to expose them to the best corporate career choices available. The main emphasis of the programme is on identifying careers where women are under-represented with a specific bias toward Mathematics, Science and Technology. The job shadowing experience is supplemented with career guidance to motivate girls to identify career opportunities and to prioritise their studies in Mathematics, Science and Technology.
She said that technology had the potential to empower women and to alter gender relations.
Enquiries:
Cornelius Tanana Monama
Tel: 012 359 0208
Cell: 082 578 4063
Let’s empower women through technology – Lulu Xingwana
