The international commitment to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) presents both opportunities and risks for persons belonging to ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. Minorities are among the poorest in most countries and so attention to issues such as poverty, primary education, health and housing can help to improve minorities' human development. There is a genuine risk, however, that the strategies used to achieve the MDGs will be less beneficial for minority groups, might increase inequalities and may harm some minority communities.

This Monday, January 16 2006, has seen the inauguration of Africa’s first democratically elected female president. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has been officially inaugurated as President of Liberia, Africa’s oldest republic. The ceremony was attended by several African leaders as well as numerous foreign dignitaries. This historical moment has received mixed responses. Many have welcomed Johnson-Sirleaf as a role model for the potential of women in politics. Others criticize her support of Charles Taylor, and question her ability to address social issues given her professional background with economic and financial institutions.

Relevant reading:

Africa’s first female president vows to deliver a better future
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=5 1146

African first for Liberian leader
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/46157 64.stm

Madam President: The changing gender dynamics of African politics -
http://zeleza.com/blog/index.php?p=34

Reforms permitting optional early retirement for women from the semi-private industrial sector will result in increased marginalisation of female workers, according to women’s groups. Under a reform package which went into effect on 15 January, women will have the option to retire at age 45 if they have worked for the same company for at least 19 years. Previously, the retirement age for women was set at 50, the same as for men.

Violence against women plays a crucial and devastating role in increasing the risk to women of HIV infection. It is both a cause and a consequence of infection, and as such is a driving force behind the epidemic. The circumstances underlying the correlation between violence against women and HIV and AIDS are a complex weave of social, cultural, and biological conditions.

An alleged ex-convict known only as "Maranda" may have been responsible for the rape of five-year-old Peris Akoth at the beginning of this year, in Kenya. Then again, he may not. However, the case has already become a rallying point for anti-rape campaigners who claim that abuses such as the one visited on Peris would be less likely to occur if Kenya had adequate legislation on the books. While a person found guilty of rape may end up with life imprisonment, there is no minimum sentence for the crime -- something activists are intent on changing.

Below is the last quarterly update (October to December 2005) that Equality Now received from SOAWR members who are working on the campaign for ratification, domestication and popularization of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa. Also included is information on the status of ratifications, meetings attended by SOAWR members and upcoming events.

Ci-après figurent les dernières mises à jour trimestrielles (octobre à décembre 2005) adressées à Egalité maintenant par des membres du Mouvement de solidarité pour les droits des femmes africaines (Solidarity for African Women’s Rights, SOAWR) qui travaillent sur la campagne pour la popularisation, la ratification et la transposition en droit interne du Protocole relatif aux droits de la femme en Afrique. On trouvera également dans le présent document des informations sur l'état des ratifications, les réunions auxquelles les membres du SOAWR ont participé, et les événements à venir.

African women are the hardest hit by HIV/Aids in Africa and yet the approach to fighting the epidemic advocated by the Bush administration fails to take account of their specific needs and circumstances. Yifat Susskind examines the "man-made" components of the crisis, including economic austerity measures, US pharmaceutical companies and onerous debt repayments.

Rebecca Lolosoli radiates a quiet authority beneath layers of elaborate beadwork that cover her forehead, neck, chest, and wrists. She smiles readily while addressing an audience of US college students, though to them, her topic is a metaphor for hopelessness. Rebecca is talking about AIDS in Africa, specifically among women in her Indigenous, Samburu village of Umoja, Kenya. "For years, people were dying and we did not know why," she recalls. "Now we know that AIDS can be avoided, but only by making great changes in our lives."

Thanks largely to the work of African public-health and social-justice advocates like Rebecca, growing numbers of people around the world know that sub-Saharan Africa is the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic: three-quarters of AIDS deaths worldwide have been in Africa, and today the continent is home to nearly two-thirds of all of those who are HIV-positive (more than 25 million people). Fewer people know that most Africans living with HIV/AIDS are women, and that young women are now being infected at a rate three to four times higher than young men. For many, this information is absorbed through a mesh of stereotypes that make human misery seem like a natural condition of life in Africa.

But while AIDS - like the litany of this year's natural disasters - may have originated in nature, the magnitude of its destruction is a man-made catastrophe. Consider the following:

- Since the 1980s when AIDS first emerged, the US has demanded "economic austerity measures" in impoverished countries. In Africa, these policies cut national health budgets in half just when public health systems needed to be ramped up to combat AIDS. Today, the pandemic is the single greatest obstacle to economic development in Africa.
- To bolster already-huge profits of US pharmaceutical companies, the Bush Administration has blocked the sale of affordable generic drugs that have saved millions of lives in rich countries.
- Women are made particularly vulnerable to HIV infection because they are denied the rights to refuse sex or insist on condom use. As the majority of those living in poverty and the poorest of the poor, women are more likely to contract HIV and more likely to develop symptoms of AIDS soon after they are infected.

AIDS, unjust economic policies, and women's inequality are mutually reinforcing crises; combating any one of these requires addressing them together. But too often, public health programs, government policies, and even activists compartmentalize issues, missing critical points of inter-connection that are keys to effecting change.

One reason for this myopia is that a singular focus on AIDS as a naturally occurring scourge allows policymakers to avoid tackling tough social issues like economic justice and gender equality. Take the relationship between AIDS and women's property rights in Kenya. Each year, hundreds of thousands of Kenyan women are widowed by AIDS. Because Kenyan laws and customs bar women from owning and inheriting property, women and their children are often forcibly displaced from their homes when their husbands die. Displacement increases women's risk of contracting HIV by exposing them to poverty, homelessness, violence, and disease, sometimes compelling them to trade sex for food and shelter. Protecting women's property rights is an urgent component of HIV/AIDS prevention strategies. But safeguarding these rights entails challenging law and tradition and spotlighting volatile issues related to land tenure and distribution of resources in an impoverished country.

In fact, any successful prevention strategy has to promote women's social and economic rights. Yet the dominant approach remains the Bush Administration's ill-conceived "ABC" strategy: "Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms." Abstinence is not a choice for women who are raped or coerced into sex. Faithfulness is irrelevant for women whose husbands have multiple partners (for African women, marriage is actually a risk factor for contracting HIV). And condoms - presented by the Bush Administration as a "last resort" in the fight against AIDS -depend on men's willingness to use them and both partner's willingness to forgo having children. Moreover, by placing the burden for prevention on individual behavior, the ABC strategy allows policymakers to ignore the poverty and inequality that form the breeding ground for AIDS.

As 2005 ended it was clear that the UN's "3 by 5" initiative to provide anti-retroviral drugs to three million people by the end of the year would l fail by a two-thirds margin. In Africa, nine out of ten people with HIV/AIDS are still denied these drugs, now almost universally available in wealthy countries. The reason? Lack of political will and high drug prices. Universal access to treatment is an achievable goal, but it requires the US and EU to act.

Effective programs that combine HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention have been implemented in Uganda, Tanzania, Thailand and elsewhere. But rather than support the best of these efforts, the Bush Administration has put AIDS policy into the hands of Christian fundamentalists (who have pushed their ideological ABC approach to prevention) and drug-company lobbyists (who have prioritized industry profits over ensuring access to life-saving medicines). Today, the White House is issuing reminders of President Bush's "compassionate" $15 billion program to fight AIDS, particularly in Africa. But that promise was made over three years ago and most of the money has never materialized. In fact, Bush's initiative actually undermined effective international efforts to combat AIDS through the UN Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. Instead of paying its fair share to the Fund ($3.5 billion, or one-third of the total), the US has pledged just $0.6 billion for 2006-2007.

This year's debt forgiveness offer by the G8 (the world's richest countries) is yet another empty promise to African AIDS sufferers. It's widely assumed that money freed up by the deal will be used to fight AIDS, but no mechanism exists to make this happen. In fact, the deal still leaves most African countries spending four times more on debt servicing than on health and education - the most critical sectors in the fight against AIDS. Actually converting debt payments into AIDS funding would yield $15 billion a year - the precise amount that UNAIDS needs to fund its programs. We know that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund can afford to cancel 100 percent of poor countries' debt without much impact on their operations. But these institutions' largest shareholder, the US, is opposed to unconditional debt cancellation. It's not really about the money, which is negligible in relation to the US economy. Rather, the US leverages the debt to ensure African governments' compliance with policies that suit US interests.

Towards the end of 2005, the United Nations released its annual report on the global AIDS crisis. It was mostly bad news, but it did credit aggressive prevention and treatment programs with reducing the adult HIV infection rate in Kenya from 10 to seven percent between the late 1990s and 2003; and with lowering infection rates for pregnant women in Kenya from a staggering 28 percent to nine percent during the same period.

Rebecca Lolosoli knows first-hand the importance of combining treatment and prevention in the fight against AIDS. Two years ago, Rebecca began working with MADRE, an international women's human rights organization, to bring HIV/AIDS prevention educators to her community. "In our trainings with MADRE, we've learned that we have a right to demand medicine for the women in our community. But our best hope is to avoid HIV in the first place. For that, we women must have the right to say no without being forced or beaten. And women need to be able to own and inherit land so that we can feed ourselves and our children. This is how we can stay healthy. Changing traditional ways is not easy," Rebecca says with a broad smile. "But it has many rewards."

* Yifat Susskind is Associate Director, MADRE. This MADRE article was published by Foreign Policy in Focus

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Sources

1 "The AIDS Epidemic Update," Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), December 2005, http://www.unaids.org/Epi2005/doc/report_pdf.html.

2Ibid

3 Ann-Louise Colgan, "Hazardous to Health: The World Bank and IMF in Africa," Africa Action, April 2002, http://www.africaaction.org/action/sap0204.htm

4 "State of World Population 2005," United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2005/english/ch4/chap4_page1.htm.

5 "Access to HIV treatment continues to accelerate in developing countries, but bottlenecks persist, says WHO/UNAIDS report," WHO/UNAIDS, 29 June 2005, http://www.who.int/3by5/progressreportJune2005/en/.

6 Craig Timberg, "Number of People With HIV Doubled in Past Decade, UN Finds," The Washington Post, 22 November 2005.

7 See: "Uganda: 'Abstinence-Only' Programs Hijack AIDS Success Story; U.S.-Sponsored HIV Strategy Threatens Youth," Human Rights Watch, 30 March 2005 http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/30/uganda10380_txt.htm.

8 Raymond W. Copson, "HIV/AIDS International Programs: Appropriations FY2003-FY2005," CRS Report for Congress, RS21181, 13 August 2004, http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/img/assets/5096/crsrs21181fy05.pdf.

9 "US Misses its Own Target to Finance the Global Fund," Oxfam, September 2005, http://www.oxfam.org.uk/press/releases/globalfund_us060905.htm.

10 Charles Mutasa, "Information Sheet on Africa's Debt," African Forum and Network on Debt and Development, 2003.

11 Thomas Maugh II, "HIV Rate Grows in Most of the World," Los Angeles Times, 22 November 2005.

12 Sony Kapoor, "Can the World Bank and IMF Cancel 100% of Poor Country Debts?" Jubilee Research at the New Economics Foundation for Debt and Development Coalition Ireland, September 2003, http://www.debtireland.org/ resources/Can-the-World-Bank-and-IMF-Cancel-debt-P.htm.

13 "The AIDS Epidemic Update," UNAIDS/WHO, December 2005.

This document is a practical manual containing critical background on the current challenges and opportunities around gender and media issues including representation, employment and ownership. The authors consider contemporary activist and academic thinking on how gender issues are linked to questions around media power and social change. Advice is offered on how to address gender issues in media institutions in order to transform organisational structures, policies and professional associations.

The world witnessed a number of major political achievements for women in 2005, from the election of Africa's first female president to the first polls in Saudi Arabia to include women. According to the president of the San Francisco-based Global Fund for Women,"this has been a year in which women have taken grassroots struggles and transformed them into something bigger by developing a very considered political strategy".

Today, January 5th, CODEPINK is launching a new campaign called '' Women Say No to War'' to bring together US women like Alice Walker, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Susan Sarandon, Cindy Sheehan and Dolores Huerta with women from countries such as Britain, Canada, Australia, Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, Jordan, Iran and especially Iraq. The purpose? To tell leaders - and the world - that women have had enough of the senseless war in Iraq.

A precedent setting ruling by a local court in Zambia has given women married under customary law the right to a share of marital property in the event of a divorce or death of the husband.Zambia has a dual legal system, and although statutory law takes precedence over customary law, the fact that many people live in rural and traditional settings has given customary law primacy in large parts of the country.

The new Tanzanian cabinet comprises of 29 ministers and 30 deputies. The cabinet has many new faces and the highest number of women the country has had since independence. The women in the new cabinet are seven ministers and 10 deputy ministers. The previous cabinet had four female ministers.

UN experts are preparing the meeting of the committee to be held at UN headquarters Jan 16-Feb 3, specializing in eliminating discrimination against women. In this meeting, the 23-member body, which sessions twice each year, will review the situation in six countries to see if they observe the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Adopted by the General Assembly in 1979, CEDAW is seen as a sort of international law on the rights of women, defining what constitutes discrimination and establishing an agenda aimed at wiping it out in every country, according to Presna Latina.

159 years after the first modern nation in Africa was established by freed American slaves, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf will be inaugurated as its first woman president (January 6). She will also be the continent's first female elected head of state. The challenges she will face are immense. Liberia has just emerged from 15 years of civil war, in which its people have been butchered and demoralised; there is no electricity in parts of the capital, Monrovia; water-supply systems have been almost universally destroyed, and schools looted or burned down; and hospitals and clinics exist in name only.

Newly elected Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete announced his cabinet on Wednesday (January 4), comprising 29 ministers and 30 deputies. The cabinet has many new faces and the highest number of women the country has had since independence. "This is a new government, with new goals and that is why we have several new faces. There are, however, several veterans around," Kikwete told a news conference at State House, his first since he was sworn-in as president on 21 December 2005.

The Global Fund report, Caught in the Storm: The Impact of Natural Disasters on Women, explores women's disproportionate vulnerability to natural disasters and offers concrete recommendations to help aid agencies and governments develop and implement more inclusive and gender-sensitive relief strategies.

A precedent setting ruling earlier this month by a local court in Zambia has given women married under customary law the right to a share of marital property in the event of a divorce or death of the husband. Previously, a woman married under customary law would not be entitled to a share of property, irrespective of whether she had contributed to its acquisition.

According to the organisers, development experience over time has proved that to achieve sustainable, people centered development, progress towards equality in the roles of women and men is essential. Development practitioners need to understand the prevailing gender relations and design programmes that enable equitable access to resources and benefits. This course is designed for development professionals who seek to build up their skills and knowledge in mainstreaming gender in their organisations and their programmes and projects.

This briefing paper offers concrete suggestions for women's health and rights advocates within and beyond Africa. It provides detailed information that can help African women exercise their reproductive rights. The paper can also be useful to advocates outside Africa who are seeking to establish similar guarantees.

The world witnessed a number of major political achievements for women in 2005, from the election of Africa's first female president to the first polls in Saudi Arabia to include women, according to the Boston Globe. "This has been a year in which women have taken grassroots struggles and transformed them into something bigger by developing a very considered political strategy," said Kavita Ramdas, president of the San Francisco-based Global Fund for Women, which provides grants to women's rights groups around the world.