Debt Detective Reports on Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality
By Pat Rumer, Jubilee Debt Detective
This is Pat, the Debt Detective in Zambia wishing everyone back in the United States a Happy Mother's Day this weekend. In honor of this day, I'm looking at Millennium Development Goal #3: promoting gender equality and empowerment. Look forward to two stories about two amazing women. First, I want to introduce you Emily Sikazwe, director of Women for Change (WFC), and whom some of you might remember as a featured speaker on a Jubilee USA tour in 2007.
Emily has served as Executive of WFC for twenty years. WFC is a gender focused organization whose primary agenda is women’s rights in rural areas. They are an advocacy organization and work with 120 women’s NGO’s in Zambia. In addition they work with the Tribal Leaders’ Council to introduce gender equality into traditional societies. They are active in monitoring the national budget from a gender perspective. Emily serves on the board of Gender Action, a member of Jubilee USA Network Council.
WHY NOT Eradicate Global Poverty INSTEAD OF ENDING IT?
Emily and her staff are quite critical of the MDG's as they are not as strong as recommendations from the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women and later, the Development conference in Copenhagen. Denmark is the lead country on MDG #3 and has selected 100 torch bearers around the world who are working effectively on gender equality and women's empowerment. Women for Change is one of them. Emily hopes that at the UN MDG Summit in New York this September that the member nations will sharpen their focus on women's empowerment in recognition that most of the goals cannot be reached without serious attention to this goal.
DEBT AND THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS
Zambia has achieved 50/50 gender parity in primary education (1-9) but not at the secondary level. Access to water and sanitation is critical if young girls are to stay in school as they mature and require more privacy. More teachers have been hired in Zambia, but the majority of women teachers are in the primary grades where the pay is lower.
Norman, a staff member responsible for tracking gender in the budget. He observed that the SAP's (Structural Adjustment Programs) have a negative impact on women's progress. The SAP's have created a "care economy" where women do the "unpaid work" in society - caring for HIV-AID patients at home as there are a shortage of beds in hospitals; organizing funerals and raising the orphans.
Emily stated that the debt debate and the HIPC process heightened awareness of indebtedness and that civil society was strong in demanding cancellation of the debt. The civil society continues to monitor new indebtedness and to fight for greater transparency in new debt contraction. The NGO's such as Women for Change are watch dogs to ensure that government funding goes to the poor. "The most effective way to fight poverty in our country is to fight corruptions."
WFC trains policy makers at the district level on gender analysis, gender budgeting and how to disseminate this information. This February WFC launched a new campaign, "The Zambia We Want." This campaign intends to engage the grassroots in a participatory process to identify the issues and to prioritize them and then, present these issues to Presidential candidates and Members of Parliament in the 2011 elections.
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