The purpose of this paper from the Center of Arab Women for Training and Research is to explain the different trajectories followed by Egypt and Morocco with regards to feminization of the labor force. While both have experienced significant informalization of their labor markets, Morocco has undergone noteworthy feminization of its work force, while Egypt (excepting the civil service) has largely de-feminized.

This United Nations (UN) Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) (2005) paper reflects on the context within which the struggle for gender justice is played out in the global environment. It provides an analytical frame to explain the core of the tensions between gender justice and other elements of social/economic justice, and the strategic implications of the multiple sites in which gender relations operate. The paper specifically explores the interplay between the feminist agenda for gender justice and neoliberal economic thinking dominated by the Washington Consensus. The author comments on the implications for gender justice of the shift to a unipolar world order, and in particular, the movement from the neoliberal era to the neoconservative one.

Aujourd’hui 25 novembre 2005, célébrons l’entrée en vigueur du protocole à la Charte africaine des droits de l’homme et des peuples relatifs aux droits des femmes en Afrique !

Ce 25 novembre 2005, le protocole à la Charte Africaine des Droits de l’Homme et des Peuples relatif aux droits des femmes en Afrique entre en vigueur. C’est avec une joie immense que nous célébrons l’évènement, qui marque un tournant important dans l’histoire de la lutte des femmes africaines pour la reconnaissance et le respect de leurs droits humains fondamentaux. A partir de ce 25 novembre 2005, date que nous voulons graver en lettres d’or dans l’histoire de notre continent, s’appliquera désormais cet outil susceptible de rendre justice aux femmes et aux filles du continent.

Merci pour votre article qui nous intérresse beaucoup. Est-ce-que nous pouvons avoir la version française? Meilleures salutations.

Editors: Bientôt, nous espérons!

It is a nice article (http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=29962). However, see my comments after this paragraph: "How long will the women in Kenya have to camp on this renegade side of the Red Sea as they wait for the magic word 'ratification' to part the raging waters and usher them to that other side where gender discrimination, repulsive FGM, forced marriages and widow inheritance, domestic and sexual violence, etc. are a thing of the past?"

I am sorry to inform you that the other side of the Red Sea is composed of Ye-men, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world where women are grossly discriminated (against). I hope this is not the direction you want Kenyan women to head to.

This 25 November, 2005, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights relating to Women's Rights in Africa enters into force. It is with a great delight that we celebrate the event, which marks a significant turning point in the history of African women’s struggle for the recognition and the respect of their basic human rights.

'Communication Skills For Women In Politics' is aimed at women in newly-established or impending Democracies or women fresh to politics in existing Democracies.  It has been designed as a practical tool-kit for trainers to use in workshops for future women politicians and for training activists campaigning for a rapid increase in women's participation in politics. Enquiries e-mail [email protected] or Lesley Abdela, Senior Partner, Shevolution, on [email protected]

Victoria [not her real name] thought she had the law on her side when she left her abusive partner and successfully applied for a protection order against him. According to provisions set out in South Africa's 1998 Domestic Violence Act and reinforced by recently enacted firearms legislation, the order gave the police powers to confiscate the gun that had repeatedly been used to terrorise her. According to the Medical Research Council (MRC), a woman is shot dead by her current or former partner every six hours, and such cases rose by 78 percent between 1990 and 1999.

She's a sex worker, but not many passers-by would suspect that the slight figure standing in a narrow street opposite a nightclub in Zimbabwe's gold mining town of Kwekwe is also a university student. Tracy Bunjwali, a second-year business studies scholar and part-time prostitute, says her biggest fear is that she might bump into somebody she knows while out on the streets waiting to be taken to a nearby hotel-cum-brothel.

There is a shortfall of some 200 million women in the world -- "missing' due to what a three-year study on violence against women calls "gendercide." The number of what the study describes as 'missing' women is based on the random birthrate of males and females and how many fewer women there are than what would be expected in the world population, said Theodor Winkler, head of a research center that directed the project. Winkler told a news conference at the United Nations that gender-related abortions and infanticides were the leading causes for the shortfall in the female population. Another factor was domestic violence, including so-called honor killings in some cultures.

Gender equality is "taking root" in African leadership, Pan African Parliament (PAP) president Gertrude Mongella said in Midrand on Monday (November 21). Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's election as President of Liberia shows "the equality of women and men in organs of power is taking root on this continent", Mongella said on the first day of the PAP's fourth ordinary session.

According to the Millennium Campaign, over 90 activists, academics, members of government and community women from India and Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, Nigeria, Krgystan, and Uganda assembled at UNDP hall, New Delhi, on November 13th and 14th for an International Consultation on Women's Land and Resource Rights. Community women's experiences were supplemented with legal and conceptual information from people who have worked on the issue at the policy and law reform level.

Hundreds of schoolgirls from disadvantaged backgrounds in Inanda, Durban, had their chance this week to showcase their strengths and highlight their needs to international visitors during a Girls' Education Movement (Gem) session. It is aimed at highlighting issues affecting girls. And with a recent financial injection of about R4-million from Barclays Bank for the project in this country, it is anticipated that up to 1,5-million children will be helped.

This article explores the gender-differentiated effects of natural disasters. It aims to fill a gap in understanding issues such as women's losses relative to men's, how women's work time and conditions change, both in terms of care-giving and income-generating work, or how disaster-related aid and entitlement programmes include or marginalise affected women.

SAfAIDS offers a short-term consultancy in two Southern African Countries - Namibia and Mozambique. SAfAIDS has become increasingly convinced of the critical role of culture in influencing the direction and rate at which social change around gender equality and HIV/AIDS prevention and impact mitigation occurs in communities.

As a part of the coalition supporting the ratification of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, Pambazuka News is profiling various aspects of the Protocol over a six-week period. This week we will look at African women’s rights to land and property. Under Article 19, the Right to Sustainable Development, the protocol states that:

“Women shall have the right to fully enjoy their right to sustainable development. In this connection, the States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to:
c) promote women’s access to and control over productive resources such as land and guarantee their right to property.”

Women in many African countries live within the confines of patriarchy. One of the ways in which this inequality has manifested is in regards to property and land rights. Women exist within overlapping tradition and official law – neither of which are always fair. The importance of these rights cannot be underestimated. Not only do women rely on land for food security and income, but women’s rights and social positions are held up in their access to land and property rights.

For a large proportion of African women, the options related to land are limited. Few have access to the money required to purchase land in the first place. Further, even though the day-to-day maintenance of land is often managed largely by women, their control over land is extremely limited. And should a wife lose her husband, inheritance laws do not generally favour women, leaving many vulnerable to homelessness and poverty should they not enjoy good marital and familial relationships.

These inequalities fit with the larger social settings that most African women find themselves in. While they are respected in some ways, the status of most African women is low. Discriminatory laws, policies, customs, traditions and attitudes both cause and exacerbate this overall environment for women. The effects of colonial laws also influence how women’s access to land and property are dealt with. The individualization of land tenure and market pressures have also interfered with women’s rights. The intersection of traditional and official law has done little for the rights of women in Africa. In communal land systems, women sometimes had rights to resources as they were, and continue to be, household managers. When land tenure was individualized, as has been the case in most of Africa, women lost this access, and were registered under their husband’s names. As a result of these dynamics, it is extremely difficult for women to enjoy the same rights and benefits of these rights, as men.

Women also suffer from an added lack of education about their rights, so in cases where women are actually accorded the rights of land and property ownership, it can be easy for men and other family members to deny these rights. Illiteracy and lack of access to formal courts intensify these conditions. Further, women’s representation in decision-making bodies is limited, and as a result, their voices are further silenced.

As a result of these official and unofficial policies that deny women access, ownership and control over land, families and communities suffer. That women must negotiate their rights through relationships to men, as either wives or kin, is not only unfair, but is extremely unbalanced. But women are stepping forward and asserting their rights and they are using both legal and customary means to do so. The Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa will be another means to strengthen not only their rights, but their means for attaining them.

Further Reading:

UN Habitat Document on Women and Land Tenure
http://www.unhabitat.org/programmes/landtenure/documents/CSDWomen.pdf

Previous Articles:

Women and Sustainable Development - http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=30299

Women in Armed Conflict - http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=30122

Female Genital Mutilation - http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=30050

Trafficking in Women and Children - http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=29740

Female Refugees - http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=29873

* Researched and written by Karoline Kemp, a Commonwealth of Learning Young Professional Intern with Fahamu.

Differences in labour force attachment across gender are important to explain the extent of the gender earnings gap. However, measures of women's professional experience are particularly prone to errors given discontinuity in labour market participation. For instance, the classical Mincerian approach uses potential experience as a proxy for actual experience due to lack of appropriate data. Such biases in the estimates cannot be ignored since the returns to human capital are used in the standard decomposition techniques to measure the extent of gender-based wage discrimination.

Source: Agenda News

This report examines the progress of the Security Council Resolution 1325 (SCR 1325) and it's call on the United Nations and Member States to increase the participation of women in decision-making and peace processes, to ensure the protection of women and girls, and to institute gender perspectives and training in peacekeeping.

Source: Agenda News

Zimbabwe's government has used state-sponsored brutality to quash dissent, and women on the front lines of protest are paying a heavy personal price. In an unlit park in central Harare on the night of Zimbabwe's March parliamentary elections, more than a hundred women gathered to sing and pray for peace. In this increasingly authoritarian southern African nation even public prayer is deemed a threat to public security. Several dozen police brandishing batons quickly arrived in tan Land Cruisers and pushed the women into the cars. By the end of the evening 300 women, most ordinary mothers and grandmothers struggling to feed hungry families, were in jail and at least nine had been beaten so badly they required hospitalization.

In a joint appeal of civil society groups towards improving the political position of women in Somaliland, women's civil society groups have noted that the seven women candidates who contested against 239 male candidates in recent elections faced critical obstacles during the campaign and the elections. These included the fact that:

- The selection process left the decision to identify candidates to the male-dominated traditional clan structure hence restricted the chances of many women who expressed interests in running for elections leaving only seven women candidates who were nominated as a token by the three political parties.

- That the patriarchal clan lineage system continues to be the fundamental root of resistance against women’s substantive political participation as women’s capacity for leadership continues to be unrecognized by their clan or their husband’s clan.

- That contrary to their public commitment to women’s empowerment, none of the three political parties pursued affirmative actions that would provide chances to women during the male-dominated campaign.