August 9 marks the commemoration of the National Women’s Day. We remember this historic day in 1956 when 20 000 women marched to the Union Buildings led by great heroines of our struggle against apartheid such as Lillian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn. To pay tribute these women, we have used their picture in all our communication material and the Department of Arts and Culture will launch an exhibition in their memory.
This year also marks the commencement of the Decade of African Women (2010-2020) as adopted by the African Union. The objectives of the decade are to preserve and build on the African women’s strength and to leverage on global and regional political goodwill for the advancement of African women with a focus on youth and grassroots women. The Decade of African Women was a major of the Pan African Women’s Day that we celebrated on Friday.
The theme: for this year’s commemoration of National Women’s Day and Month is: “Working together for equal opportunities and progress for all women”. The theme is a national call for a united approach towards achieving gender equality by ensuring that women have equal opportunities and progress towards gender equality is hastened.
The programme for the month as you will notice in the calendar of events includes a variety of activities aimed at addressing various aspects of challenges facing women today within the context of the five national priorities and 12 critical outcomes of government and against global and regional milestones.
The 2010 Women’s Month programme focuses on poverty reduction and improving the socio-economic status of women. Our country has taken a number of steps to mainstream gender perspectives in poverty reduction strategies. These strategies have led to implementation of income support programmes like women in housing, women in mining and energy, women in subsistence farming and other programmes for development of rural women.
Progress has been made on legislative reforms to facilitate gender equality and improved representation of women in decision making position. Representation of women in the legislature increased from 25 percent after the first democratic elections in 1994 to 44 percent after April 2009 elections. South Africa proudly stands at number three amongst countries of the world with the highest number of women in parliament. The number of women members of Cabinet (ministers and deputy ministers) increased from 18 percent in 1994 to 40 percent post 2009 elections.
There is also a steady progress in representation of women at senior levels of the public service at an average of 36 percent at the end of 2009 and we will focus on this matter during the Public Service Week (23 to 27 August).
There is still under-representation of women as paid employees in general, and the challenge worsens at top management level of the private sector. 16 years into our democracy, we still have white men holding 63 percent of top management positions in the private sector while African women are at less than three percent and coloured and Indian women at one percent each. Our analysis of various studies available indicates that if we continue at the current pace of transformation, it will take us almost 40 years to attain 50-50 gender parity. We cannot allow that. Measures have to be taken to hasten the process of gender and racial transformation in our country.
In this regard the Ministry for Women, Children and Persons with Disabilities is developing the Gender Equality Bill which should enforce gender parity measures across all sectors of society.
Progress have been made in increasing access to education for girls and we have to ensure that skills development programmes focus on empowering women into careers that are still male dominated. To enforce mentoring of girls into various careers, on 19 August, we will all be supporting the Take a Girl Child to Work campaign.
The other area of focus for this month will be the challenge of violence against women and children. The experience of the 2010 Soccer World Cup indicates that it is possible to minimise incidents of abuse through a combination of high community awareness, social cohesion and effective social and law enforcement services.
Information available suggests that the predicted upsurge in human trafficking and other forms of abuse never materialised. To the contrary, the reports arising from the contingency measures put in place in all host provinces indicate that children who went missing during the World Cup were reconnected with their families.
Gauteng reported the highest number (35) of people, mostly children, who went missing including a Mexican and Taiwanese nationals. All of them were reconnected with their families with the help of social workers and interpreters deployed in the host cities. North West reported 24 and Eastern Cape two and all were reconnected. There were no incidents reported in Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Western Cape.
Mpumalanga has reported that there were a total of 203 separate cases of children who wanted to cross from both sides of the Lubombo Border without proper documentation or parent’s approval. Through collaboration with authorities in Mozambique, all children were linked with their families.
We need to retain the same high level of law enforcement, solidarity and the spirit of ubuntu demonstrated by our people during the World Cup. During this month, programmes such as Thuthuzela, Victim Empowerment Shelters and Imbeleko Project focusing on mothers in correctional service centres will receive greater focus.
The National Women’s Day event takes place at the Buffalo City Municipality in Eastern Cape. Our programme starts on 8 August with a memorial lecture at Walter Sisulu University focusing on the theme: “Working together for equal opportunities and progress for all women”. Later in the day, we will have an Interfaith Congregation bringing together women from all faith-based organisations.
On 9 August, we will be at Buffalo City Stadium starting at 9am with a cultural programme. Parallel to that there will be several exhibitions from various departments, crafters and civil society groups. We will also use this opportunity to provide HIV testing services with leaders encouraged to lead by example in this regard and I will be one of those who will test. Other services such as registration for birth certificates, identity documents (IDs) and social grants will be provided on site.
The official programme runs from 11h00 to 13h00 and will include addresses from the mayor, the Premier and the Minister for Women, Children and Persons with Disabilities. We will thereafter receive a keynote address from the President of our country, President Jacob Zuma.
A lot of effort has gone into ensuring full participation by all sectors in this year’s Women’s Month celebration. We are indeed confident that this month is going be a period when all of us as South Africans reflect on the advances and recommit ourselves to address the many challenges on our path to creating a truly non-sexist and democratic society. We will make the assessment of this month’s programme at a closing ceremony that is being organised to take place in Limpopo on 31 August.
Let us work together for equal opportunities and progress for all women.
Forward to the Decade of African Women.
