Africa: Women Leaders Meet in Maputo

September 17, 2006 - (Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique) "Women are born to live and not to die", declared Mozambique's former first lady, Graca Machel on Saturday.

Machel, who currently heads one of Mozambique's best-known NGOs, the Community Development Foundation (FDC), was speaking at the opening session in Maputo of a meeting of African Women Leaders, and she was referring to the high rates of maternal mortality in Africa.

"All the major diseases mostly kill women and children", she exclaimed. "It's not right that women should be dying every day". Women died silently and anonymously, Machel added, ending up as "nothing more than a simple statistic".

Machel noted that there has been talk about reducing maternal mortality for more than two decades, but nothing had been done. "Women are always last in programmes to cut death rates in Africa", she said. Turning to the AIDS epidemic, Machel said it was not enough to talk of abstinence, faithfulness and the use of condoms to prevent women from being infected by the HIV virus that causes AIDS.

"In recent years, infected women are young and faithful", she argued. "These faithful women caught the HIV virus in their homes, infected by their own husbands". Asked how to prevent this, Machel suggested the use of microbicides. While there is no microbicide on the market that offers 100 per cent protection against HIV, the ones that do exist are 70 per cent effective - and so could help save many lives.

The meeting is intended to draw up a balance sheet of the progress made in promoting women's rights in Africa. Unfortunately, Africa's only woman head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been unable to attend, due to other engagements.

The meeting should discuss setting up mechanisms through which African women leaders can play a more active strategic role in promoting and protecting women's rights. Such a mechanism would seek to force the issues of key importance to women much higher up the continental and international agendas.

For Graca Machel, "gender is at the centre of development in Africa". She called for 50 per cent of the members of all African Union bodies to be women. As for national parliaments, she noted that only Rwanda was close to meeting the 50 per cent target - 49 per cent of Rwanda's parliamentary seats are held by women.

In only six African countries (including Mozambique) are more then 30 per cent of the parliamentarians women. Appealing to Mozambican women, Machel called on them to set their sights higher. "We women should not deceive ourselves", she said. "We shouldn't say we have a woman deputy chair of parliament, a woman Prime Minister and lots of women in parliament. We shouldn't be satisfied with just this". How many women possess substantial wealth?, she asked. Where are African women in major business ventures ? "Why can't women be rich ?", asked Machel.

She pointed out that women are responsible for some 80 per cent of Africa's agricultural production. Yet when it comes to taking decisions, "women are purely and simply excluded", she protested. "Nowhere do we hear the voices of the women who are really producing".

From:http://allafrica.com/stories/200609180831.html