Moving forward, backward or on the same spot?

"Why, following a decade of international, regional and national commitments to gender and development, have we not made significant and sustainable delivery on these commitments so as to assure the widest possible enjoyment of African women's human rights?" This was the key question the African women's movement asked itself during a two-day NGO Forum held in Addis Ababa on 6-7 October 2004.

Over three hundred and thirty women representing more than 200 NGOs and women's organisations from across the continent attended the Forum, whose recommendations were passed on to the 7th African Regional Conference on Women, at which government leaders assessed progress and obstacles with regard to the implementation of the Dakar and Beijing Platforms for Action, adopted in 1995.

Changing context for women's struggles

Participants at the NGO Forum highlighted the growing influence of the World Trade Organisation in ensuring that international financing, trade and investment agreements uphold structural adjustment in African countries, which works against the economic empowerment of women. They further analysed the backlash against women's rights through rising militarism and all kinds of fundamentalisms following the September 11 attacks on the US, which are contributing to communal tensions at all levels and hindering progress towards African women's autonomy, choice and security, particularly with respect to their reproductive and sexual health and rights.

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Achievements

The NGO Forum acknowledged the crucial role of NGOs in moving on the Beijing commitments, despite real human and financial resource constraints as well as new threats to their work due to the changed context in which they exist. Two critical areas in which all five sub-regions have registered progress are education and political participation.

Advances with respect to African women's involvement in decision-making and political participation have resulted from the shift towards political pluralism in many African states, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the movement towards upholding peace in African states previously in armed conflict. The newly formed African Union has committed itself to gender equality in its constitution, its Declaration on Gender Equality and its new Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. The NGO Forum called on African states to urgently ratify this Protocol so that is can come into force. With respect to education, girls now attend primary school equally with boys in most African countries.

Challenges

The meeting was informed that poverty among African women has, in fact, increased over the past decade. Women's access to productive resources, such as land, is influenced by customary and religious factors that exclude them from exercising effective control over productive resources and the benefits derived from them. Combatants involved in armed conflicts continue to target African women's bodies as the means to wage war, with brutal and dire consequences for women's reproductive and sexual health and rights. Even in peaceful situations, the forms and incidents of violence against women reported continue to increase, with trafficking in African women becoming a major concern. Violence against women is also increasingly linked to HIV and Aids. In the absence of prevention strategies that take African women's lack of reproductive and sexual autonomy and choice into account, African women continue to constitute, by far, the majority of those infected. The lack of African women's reproductive and sexual autonomy and choice means that women continue to die from female genital mutilation, maternal mortality and unsafe abortions.

The Forum concluded that there was a clear need for the African Women's Movements to assess their strategising--as governments, as NGOs and as partnerships of both--so as to make the difference needed in the lives of all African women in all their diversity.