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WHAT DO THE women of Africa want in 50 years? African women want to live in a peaceful society where women are involved in creating equitable markets and where women’s enterprises can flourish, according to Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director at UNWomen.
African women also want recognition that they are powerful agents of change and leadership and want a shared commitment by men and women to ending gender discrimination and ensuring equality.
Why put a 50 year timeframe onto pressing goals and needs which ought to be met sooner? Well, 50 years is the timescale set by the African Union for its ‘Agenda 2063’ which sets out a vision for the continent’s development over the next half-century.
What women want
With this goal in mind 2015 has been designated the ‘year of women’s empowerment and development’. This is not the only landmark event this year that opens the possibility of creating space to ask ‘what women want’. The year 2015 also marks the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration which saw 189 governments make historic commitments to achieving women’s rights, which today remain a powerful source of guidance and inspiration. And 2015 is also the year that new ‘sustainable development goals’ will be set by the UN, which will include targets for gender equality. It is a good time to assess how the movement towards equality for women and girls has progressed globally in the last 20 years.
All these international frameworks seem to point both to progress made and more room being made politically available for women’s empowerment. Yet enormous gaps in progress and barriers to change remain. Gender discrimination is still manifest in terms of poverty, wages, education, control of assets, political presence and vulnerability to violence right across the world.
Imbalance exists across the world
Globally, women make up just 22% of parliamentarians. While more than two thirds of countries and areas have reached gender parity in primary education, only 40% of them have achieved parity at the secondary level. Over their lifetimes, women in Sweden and France can expect to earn 31% less than men; this figure is 49% for women in Germany and 75% for women in Turkey. Only 4% of signatories in 31 major peace processes between 1992 and 2011 were women.
Despite progress made in Africa – more girls in school, more women in leadership roles in business and politics – significant structural and cultural barriers to gender equality persist. Poverty on the continent has a female face. While progress has been made in the reduction of maternal mortality, it is still unacceptably high at 640 deaths per 100,000 live births (WHO 2012).
Violence against women is still accepted as the norm in many African societies, despite presence of strong laws. Conflicts are displacing women and children and making them vulnerable to abuse as they seek safety. Access to justice in these circumstances is minimal.
More than half of the girls in Mali, Mozambique and Niger are married before age 18. In these same countries, more than 75% of people live on less than $2 a day. In sub-Saharan Africa, in households without piped water, women and girls carry 71% of the water collection burden.
Listening to women’s voices
How is it possible to move beyond the legacies of gendered power inequalities and give real life to the aspirations found in the many international frameworks we are marking in 2015? One way is to listen to the inventive voices of African women leaders.
Three such leaders will be the key speakers at the Trinity International Development Initiative’s Africa Day celebrations. Lilian Oyaji supports women’s entrepreneurial flair, Faiza Mohamed works on women’s human rights and peacebuilding and Minna Salami blogs her creative ideas about African feminism. It’s from these women we can hear ‘what African women want’ and from their actions we can see signs of change happening.
Trinity College Dublin is hosting an international conference today (Monday, May 25th, 2015) which will hear from leading change-makers who are transforming the landscape of gender equality in Africa and globally. Entitled Inspiring Change: Empowering Women’s Futures in Africa, the event is organised by Trinity International Development Initiative (TIDI) and is being held to mark the seventh annual Africa Day celebration. See more here.
Dr Gillian Wylie is Head of the Irish School of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin. A lecturer in International Peace Studies, her primary research interest lies in the areas of human trafficking for sexual and labour exploitation in the context of globalisation. She is also interested in questions of gender as they shape war and peace.
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Preaching to the wrong choir, take your message to Africa and the African people. We can’t “shape a fairer africa” that’s up to the natives.
Thejournal.ie has a massive readership among African warlords and local representatives.
is that true or a joke?
It’s true. I lead a group of 50 fighters in Senegal. All of my friends read the journal too, and are big fans of yours.
More lip service from people taking UN money pocketing most of it and throwing the rest into lavish parties for foreign dignitaries to make outlandish declarations they have no intention of ever honouring….. If these people were serious we’d see change right away
Ripper,
It’s a well known fact that a huge amount of African warlord have a daily ceasefire agreement in place with one another. At 6pm every day they stop baiting the sh*te out of one another for an hour so they can kick back, browse thejournal, open a Tayto multipack and have a cup of Lyons. Some groups have Barrys. I believe a heated debate over which is superior started most of the trouble.
Irish missionaries introduced them to the site and they go pure stone mad if they miss the latest goings on.
wow you learn something new every day. nice to see our culture spreading round the world.
If Islam takes route across the entire continent of Africa no one will listen to the women
Catholic Church already saw to it…
Yeah, because women in Africa have had such a sweet deal under Christians.
It’s ludicrous to speak of Africa as a whole, it’s a continent of vastly different beliefs and ethnicities.
We must impose our western values on those uncultured Africans , racist liberal moral superiority 101 , leave Africa alone , let Africans fix their own problems ,racist imperialist westerners have caused enough problems throughout the continent , now white western feminists are stirring the pot in cultures that don’t want or need them .
I think there is a certain wisdom in using our not insubstantial foreign aid commitments as a means of leveraging African nations to improve their human rights – particularly with regards to women and children. It’s just unfortunate that in the countries that probably need that aid the most, that so much of it will probably be skimmed off by corrupt political leaders.
@graham – Would that be the half billion foreign aid that we have to borrow every year to send them?
I do enough listening to women thank you.
Short sighted mindset has back the entire continent. Corruption runs from the top echelons of politics to the average person on the street.
Don’t worry about the Africans , very soon there won’t be any , they will all be Europeans
Don’t worry about the Africans , very soon there won’t be any , they will all be NEW Europeans
Irish and EU aid money should focus on contraception , as the African population is growing a rate that cannot be sustained. Women who have 2 or less children should receive a payment for doing so.
Western driven eugenics you mean?
You don’t know the difference between birth control and eugenics.
No I do. Eugenics is a social philosophy that is based on an attempt to either increase the reproduction of a people with desired traits or reduce the reproduction of a people with undesired traits.
And just to remind you that you haven’t just said hand out birth control. If you did I wouldn’t have an issue. You’ve advocated paying poor people not to have children. What you are suggesting is not only deeply suspect but would likely lead to illegal abortions and infanticide. Poor people in these countries have more children because they don’t expect them all to survive. If poverty is reduced so will the birth rate . Not the other way around
People should not have children if they can’t look after them.
During the scramble for Africa colonisation and asset stripping was justified by bringing Western values and religion to the people there. The same thing could happen again only with corporations instead of countries, and liberal values instead of religion.
Sorry. We didn’t have 4000 years to wait for their industrial revolution.
Gendered equality seems a pipe dream whilst endemic corruption in the African continent remains rampant. This corruption prioritises survival over political flourishing of human rights for so many of the poor in that tragic Continent.
” Giving alms to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time — millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize the need for it. Calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year.
Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. It’s increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest (the fact that over 60% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is under the age of 24 with few economic prospects is a cause for worry). Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.
Hush now. We give the people what they want. So what if solutions for endemic corruption have been implemented time and time again? I’m sure women will fix this.
Africa like Asia needs to urgently curb human population numbers. Parts of Africa are unsustainable and struggles with extreme famine and drought.
Africa also needs to come up plans to sustain and drastically improve the numbers and habitats of wild animals. It is running the risk if being an extinct barren landscape in fifty years.
@Jay. A different perspective respectfully offered..
” The world is not overpopulated. That fallacy is perpetuated in all environmental research, policy and planning including global warming and latterly climate change. So what are the facts about world population?
The US Census Bureau provides a running estimate of world population. It was 6,994,551,619 on February 15, 2012. On October 30, 2011 the UN claimed it passed 7 billion; the difference is 5,448,381. This is more than the population of 129 countries of the 242 listed by Wikipedia. It confirms most statistics are crude estimates, especially those of the UN who rely on individual member countries, yet no accurate census exists for any of them
Population density is a more meaningful measure. Most people are concentrated in coastal flood plains and deltas, which are about 5 percent of the land. Compare Canada, the second largest country in the world with approximately 35.3 million residents estimated in 2013 with California where an estimated 37.3 million people lived in 2010. Some illustrate the insignificance of the density issue by putting everyone in a known region. For example, Texas at 7,438,152,268,800 square feet divided by the 2012 world population 6,994,551,619 yields 1063.4 square feet per person. Fitting all the people in an area is different from them being able to live there. Most of the world is unoccupied by humans.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/05/overpopulation-the-fallacy-behind-the-fallacy-
It seems like every year is the Year of Women’s Empowerment
Who knows what anyone wants in fifty years time, except to be fifty years younger, I think?
How I Got My Husband Back………..
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How I Got My Husband Back………..
My Names is Monica Brown ,AM from United states .i never believed in love spells or magic until i met this spell caster once when i went to Switzerland in June last year on a business summit i meet a man called Dr Osuko, is powerful he could help you cast a spells to bring back my love s gone misbehaving lover looking for some one to love you bring back lost money and magic money spell or spell for a good job i m now happy & a living testimony cos the man i had wanted to marry left me 4weeks before our wedding and my life was upside down cos our relationship has been on for 3 year i really loved him, but his mother was against me and he had no good paying job so when i met this spell caster, i told him what happened and explained the situation of things to him at first i was undecided,skeptical and doubtful, but i just gave it a try and in 6 days when i returned to taxes my boyfriend (is now my husband ) he called me by himself and came to me apologizing that everything had been settled with his mom and family and he got a new job interview so we should get married i didn’t believe it cos the spell caster only asked for my name and my boyfriends name and all i wanted him to do well we are happily married now and we are expecting our little kid and my husband also got a new job and our lives became much better in case anyone needs the spell caster for some help his email address: osukospelltemple@gmail.com
..How I Got My Husband Back………..
My Names is Monica Brown ,AM from United states .i never believed in love spells or magic until i met this spell caster once when i went to Switzerland in June last year on a business summit i meet a man called Dr Osuko, is powerful he could help you cast a spells to bring back my love s gone misbehaving lover looking for some one to love you bring back lost money and magic money spell or spell for a good job i m now happy & a living testimony cos the man i had wanted to marry left me 4weeks before our wedding and my life was upside down cos our relationship has been on for 3 year i really loved him, but his mother was against me and he had no good paying job so when i met this spell caster, i told him what happened and explained the situation of things to him at first i was undecided,skeptical and doubtful, but i just gave it a try and in 6 days when i returned to taxes my boyfriend (is now my husband ) he called me by himself and came to me apologizing that everything had been settled with his mom and family and he got a new job interview so we should get married i didn’t believe it cos the spell caster only asked for my name and my boyfriends name and all i wanted him to do well we are happily married now and we are expecting our little kid and my husband also got a new job and our lives became much better in case anyone needs the spell caster for some help his email address: osukospelltemple@gmail.com
Dr. bright spell and his temple of solution are NOT evil. http://www.drbrightlovetemple-spells.com
I thought many times before i contact him. I thought he was a scam like others. My sincere apologies.
I contacted him because of my personal life was upside down. After 7 years of marriage, my wife was going in the wrong direction. she got attracted by a mysterious man and moved in with him for 4 months. after the left me and the kids i felt i could never forgive her for abandoning us But after i meet Dr.Bright, the whole story turned around and things started to be as before . he also made me realize that she was under a spell and that was why she left without looking back.She came back to our house saying she doesn’t know what happened, and she was sorry about leaving. Our relationship is stronger than ever. I have no words to thank you enough for you good work.
my prayer is that may the almighty God continue to empower you.
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Name :Kenneth Ferdinard
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She was the bread winner of the house and when she wanted to leave it was like my whole life was leaving.
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i even had to borrow the 100 dollars i sent to him but behold he brought her back even before the 24 hours and also i am happy to say i even got a new job now thanks to dr igodo.
Now i can even assist the family. am a happy man again thanks to dr igodo.
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Falling in love with derrick was the sweetest thing to ever happen to me. i meet him when i was 23 and we had been together for 5 years so when he left me it was like me whole life was ending i looked for solution every but could not find one i even almost killed my self when i found out that he already started seeing someone else.
I confronted this particular lady on one occasion and told her derrick is mine and i will do anything to have him back even offered her money but she refused funny enough she is 10 years older than derrick so i suspected a foul play and cant just imagine myself loosing the love of my life to an older woman so i continue the search for solution.
It was about 8 month since derrick stopped talking to me and one day a saw a post online about a spell caster (DR BRIGHT) had no option i had to try and see if it would work which i did behold at after 48hour my man showed up at my house with flower and wanted to start apologizing i just told him to forget and told him i am happy to have him back because DR BRIGHT already told me he was under a spell.
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VIRGINIA,USA
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Name: Rosie Nathan
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