The Programme director
Distinguished guests
Comrades
I bid you all a very good afternoon. Thank you for providing me with this opportunity to address the meeting today of a gathering of women leaders in the twenty affiliated unions to Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), or as the invitation stated “a meeting of working class women”.
I want to applaud ourselves that just last week Comrade Getrude from Cosatu Gender Desk was able to participate in the department’s National Gender Machinery meeting on a consultation on issues of a mainstreaming strategy and towards the gender equality bill, and almost a week later, the Ministry is able to be at Cosatu’s National Gender Meeting. This is what we need in order to strengthen our struggles for women’s empowerment and gender equality. This is about key partnerships and working together.
Trade Union action has been the key turning point in our struggles for both racial and women’s emancipation, and the might of the working class women must be nurtured, fostered and directed in the way that brings us the greater rewards we are looking for in our country, such as in:
- The fight against women’s poverty and economic dependence
- Fighting crime, violence and abuse of women and girls
- Fighting the feminisation of the HIV and AIDS pandemic
- Fighting unemployment and lack of working opportunities for women
- Fighting the lack of sufficient educational opportunities of majority of women in rural areas.
Programme director,
Allow me to briefly share with the comrades present here the purpose of this department. It is to strengthen the current institutional mechanisms for advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality to enable the machinery to perform more effectively and efficiently. The aim is to accelerate the realisation of a non-sexist and non racial South Africa as envisaged in the Constitution of the Republic South Africa, Act 108 of 1996.
The department acts as a central coordinating point for national efforts on women’s empowerment and ensures the mainstreaming of gender considerations in all national policies, programmes and activities. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality and ensure that the institutional mechanisms at all levels and in all spheres of governance are strengthened, and to open up space for some serious thinking on the inclusion of rural women who are in the most poverty stricken areas of our country.
The vision and mission of the department is “A fully inclusive society free from unfair discrimination, inequality, abuse and exploitation”. This means that all efforts of the department, and the manner in which relevant stakeholders in the public sector, private sector, business, corporate world, labour movement and civil society, as well as the manner in which it provides oversight on gender, disability and children’s issues in the country, will be geared towards ensuring a society that is non-sexist, non racist, inclusive, human rights based and conducive to the advancement, development, promotion and protection of the three groups.
Experience indicates that the potential of local women’s organisations, including the action of women in the labour movement and trade unions is not being tapped by government. We are therefore calling for greater support and nurturing of women’s organisations, non governmental organisations (NGOs) and Civil Society Organisations (CSO’s) as they understand the local context, and have access to contacts at local level.
The vision of this department will only be achieved through direct links with women in civil society organisations, NGOs and structures such as these national gender committees of the trade unions, as a pathway for us to interact and share and work together on fighting the persistent discrimination of women in all aspects of her life.
Programme director,
Although South Africa’s multi-agency national gender machinery is globally acknowledged as one of the most advanced machineries, lack of financial and human resources have prevented it from achieving its original objective of truly transforming women’s lives. Although many global commitments have been made towards financing for gender equality and the empowerment of women, women remain amongst the poorest of the poor, and few countries have managed to achieve a holistic approach to financing for women’s empowerment.
Within the many constraints that exists, some of the initiatives that the department is currently working on are the:
- Proposed Gender Equality Bill
- Sanitary Dignity Campaign
- Technogirl project which focuses on increasing access to education, training, science and technology by girls and women, a project we’ve just showcased at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW) recently
- On addressing the scourge of violence against women and girls we are proposing an advisory council which will be a structure coordinating all efforts aimed at the eradication of Violence against women and girls
- On addressing rural development and poverty eradication, we are looking at the possibility of coming up with a fund that will support our rural development programmes, support NGO’s and CSO’s.
We have recently presented our consolidated second, third and fourth progress reports to the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee in Geneva in January 2011. The concluding observations of the committee have indicated both positive and negative aspects of our struggles for women’s empowerment and gender equality.
While we have made great strides and tremendous progress in areas such as political representation of women and on representation of women in management positions in government, we are doing very badly with regard to the representation of women in management positions in the corporate sector. This was also corroborated two weeks ago with the release of the latest survey by the Business Women’s Association on women CEOs and Board Chairs; we are now looking at working with the Businesswomen's Association (BWA) and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) to look at including the criteria of gender equity issues for listing of companies on the JSE.
The concluding observations of the CEDAW Committee also allude to the work opportunities and creation of employment opportunities and decent work for women, especially in the instance of rural women and urban poor women.
However, our greatest scourge and blight in the country is that of violence against women and girls. The committee was very vociferous in this regard and upfront and blatant about South Africa’s high rates of sexual violence and abuse.
Comrades, we will be addressing what came out of the CEDAW reporting process, the Beijing +15 review in 2010 and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) reporting in 2010, during our proposed National Women’s Conference scheduled for later this year. It is a conference intended to give women an opportunity to come together and voice their issues – especially following the establishment of a Ministry that women have been calling for. Women must tell us where they would like to see this Ministry go.
With regard to the addressing the issue of violence against women and girls, government has been part of the launch of the United Nations Secretary-General’s campaign on ending violence against women from its inception. In 2008, during the 52nd Session of the UNCSW in New York, the Secretary-General utilised the International Women’s Day commemoration to “blow the whistle on violence against women and girls” in a global way.
He also announced the creation of a global database on violence against women”. This database was launched in March 2009, during the 53rd Session of the UNCSW. Together with the campaign to “Unite to end violence against women”, this database will assist in raising awareness on a large scale and will definitely result in intergovernmental collaboration on a grander scale towards preventing organised crime such as the trafficking in humans especially women and girls.
However, programme director, we need to bring this global effort closer to home – both to Africa and South Africa itself. While the continent shows high levels of violence against women and girls especially in conflict-torn countries, South Africa in particular presents serious concerns in some types of violence against women and girls and children in general.
All of these efforts towards addressing violence against women are critical for us in this country – both as the Ministry for Women, Children and People with Disabilities, other government entities as well as civil society and NGOs. This means that we need to elevate these campaigns into national ones and collaborate in a meaningful way to bring coherence to these efforts.
A more concerted effort is needed by us to raise awareness within the justice and legal systems. Let us not only look at prevention – because this is only addressing the symptoms. Let us look at the root causes – which mean we need to tackle the issues of patriarchy and institutionalised sexism. We also need to address the issue of socialisation – when we as women and children and girls allow these things to happen to us because of the way we have been socialised. We need to also begin to address the issue of masculinity and what it means to be a man in the present society vis a vis cultural and traditional practices.
The National Women’s Conference will give us an opportunity to review the global fight against patriarchy and all other forms of oppression against women. As the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels outlines it in his essay “On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”; the history of patriarchy can be traced back to the emergent of an economically uneven society. Since the development of a class society, women have been exploited both as suppliers of labour themselves and as producers of more sources of labour through child bearing.
Various political and cultural practices were adopted to reinforce or justify the dominance of men over women. Until today, women are still fighting some of these cultural practices such ukuthwala (forced marriages) and female genital mutilation. It is for that reason that we encourage the South Africa Law Commission to investigate the appropriate legal instrument to make ukuthwala an offence.
Currently, we rely on the Sexual Offences Act which protects young girls under the age of 16 years from such a practice. We also have to find a legal instrument to protect adult women who may still be subjected to this harmful traditional practice against their will.
Despite current participation in the paid labour market, women continue to carry the burden of unpaid work including domestic duties and child care. All of this labour from women remains unrecognised in our society because what is not measured cannot be valued economically. Therefore, the efforts of our government to achieve universal access to Early Childhood Development programme does not only support child growth and enhance education outcomes. It also frees many women of the burden of unpaid work.
However, as reported at the 55th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York last month, many women remain in feminised sectors of the economy with a significant gender wage gap. There is a need to intensify efforts to increase the number of women in economic sectors such as natural science, engineering and technology.
At this United Nations (UN) Session, South Africa presented a number of initiatives being undertaken by the country through the Basic Education, Higher Education and Science and Technology departments to increase the number of women in these sectors. One of the projects well received at the UN and is particularly supported by United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) was Techno Girls. Through this project girls from grade 9 to 12 are recruited and exposed to various science and technology opportunities in that exists particularly in the private sector.
Programme director,
I want to conclude by saying the right to vote and to hold public office has largely been achieved in our country. Our struggle now is about equal representation of women in decision-making positions. On the political front, at the national and provincial level we are a global best practice of women participation in the struggle for social justice and in shaping the political landscape after the transition.
Now is the time for women to stand up and really be counted in the upcoming local government elections. We must strive towards the 50/50 representation of women in key positions in this level if we are to make an impact as women but more importantly on the lives of other women – ordinary women that place all their trust in us as women leaders – we must not let them down.
How this country moves forward over the next five years of local governance is very much dependent on how the women of this country choose to shape it – be it in elected local government positions, as women voters, women participants in local governance or as women influencing the mainstreaming of local processes to heed both their basic needs as well as strategic needs.
I thank you.
Source: Department of Women, Children and Persons With Disabilities
