African women's engagement with the United Nations
An interview with Dr Jacinta Muteshi of Kenya's National Commission for
Gender and Development
By Kathambi Kinoti

AWID: What real impact has the United Nations and its processes had on women in Africa?
Jacinta Muteshi: The United Nations Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has delivered resources for a lot of our work. By resources I do not mean just financial resources but also technical assistance and capacity building. We need the work of UNIFEM, the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) and other such structures to continue. However they should be strengthened, their profiles raised and their resources increased.

When the UN organized its first World Conference for Women in Mexico in 1975 it set in motion a process by bringing together for the first time women from all over the world, a process that was continued by the subsequent meetings in Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing in 1980, 1985 and 1995 respectively. What this process did was to put governments on notice with regard to their obligations towards women.

The Nairobi meeting was the first global meeting in Africa. It allowed women from the South to put their voices on the global agenda. For the first time African women were able to say: 'We can and must speak on international issues.' We were able to show how international issues have impacted us.

The UN has facilitated international treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) which have been very important for us. CEDAW set out some commitments that women could hold their governments to and gave women legal recourse. It provided us with a framework that would enable us to tell our governments: 'Gender
justice would look would look like this.' Countries want to be part of an international community of nations therefore they want to be seen to be delivering on their commitments under the treaties they sign.

The challenge is that the commitment to women's equality it is not a shared commitment. The patriarchal influence is still very strong, and even when governments know their obligations towards women, there is no real political will to fulfill their obligations.

AWID: How accessible are UN agencies and processes to women on the ground in Africa? Do women's organizations effectively engage with the UN?

JM: Most women's NGOs in Africa are hard pressed to deliver services and to deliver on the practical needs of women. They provide basic services that are a matter of life and death for women; food, interventions against violence, legal aid, HIV and AIDS awareness and so on. They are serving needs that should ordinarily be met by governments, but these governments do not have enough resources to deliver the services. Structural adjustment policies (SAPS), liberalization and other economic policies that were imposed upon governments in the South took away the much needed resources
that used to be provided by government.

Because women's NGOs are primarily providing basic services to women every day, very few of them are looking at the strategic needs of women such as engagement with the UN and UN processes to maximize on the opportunities that such engagement would bring. They are not doing much strategic work because their resources in terms of people, money and time are stretched to the limit. However women's organizations do commonly engage with the UN agencies by going to them for resources. Urban-based NGOs have better access in terms of knowledge about the availability of UNIFEM and other agencies. They also have better access in terms of location; for instance an organization in Nairobi would find it logistically easier to access UNIFEM than would one in a remote part of Kenya. On the other hand, most urban-based NGOs in Kenya have a reach in rural areas and therefore the resources reach rural women and knowledge about CEDAW and the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA) and so on are spread.

Processes like CEDAW and BPFA have become the lenses through which other emerging development policies and practices are scrutinized. For instance women's organizations have scrutinized the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) through these lenses. All new processes can be strengthened by examining them against the background of the standards in CEDAW and BPFA.

We conducted some research that revealed that the work of most women's organizations in Kenya seems intuitively to reflect the BPFA. The standards within this instrument guide their work.

AWID: Does this mean that most organizations are aware of CEDAW and the
BPFA or how is it that their work reflects these standards?

JM: There are some processes that consciously convey knowledge about these instruments. UNIFEM and other organizations have done a lot of work around this. We have also developed a national policy on gender and development that was framed within these processes. Therefore some processes do consciously use CEDAW and the BPFA as a blueprint. However, the instruments also have an indirect influence on gender equality work. Many of the people who participate in the processes that have led to CEDAW and the BPFA have shaped their organizations' work around the shared understanding of gender justice and women's equality. This shared understanding has arisen from global conversations that led up to the passing of international standards. So while the work of an organization may not consciously be based on CEDAW or the BPFA, it will be influenced by the ideals of these instruments.

AWID: What kind of reforms to the UN would women in Africa like to see?

JM: International treaties are negotiated and so the crucial question is: Who participates in the negotiations that take place? Women need to be an integral part of all processes, not only those that primarily address women's rights, but others as well, such as those that address trade. There are many processes from which women have been excluded They have been present at some like CEDAW, but such processes are weakened when governments make reservations, do not commit to the obligations set out in treaties, or try to retreat on their pledges as we have seen in the past. Women's rights advocates constantly have to expend a lot of energy on
safeguarding the gains made.

We need to ensure that women from the global South have a stronger voice in the UN. Since countries send representatives to negotiate for them at the UN processes this means ensuring that our governments practice affirmative action in appointative positions. There are not enough women in decision-making positions in the UN and this under-representation of women in leadership means that the UN will continue to have problems delivering on its mandate. Over the years more and more women have moved up in its ranks but they are not enough to make a real impact. The UN has for a long time had in place policies and practices to mainstream gender but these are not making a real change. We need more women in senior positions. This would require political will from the very top of the UN. There have been calls for a woman Secretary-General and this drive comes from not only from the fact that it is time that a woman was in that position, but also from the conviction that a woman may respond differently to the challenges of gender mainstreaming and may deliver better on the promise of women's equality. Women see the UN as a body that has the power to greatly influence the achievement of gender equality. We need to see a recommitment to making the UN an effective body that occupies a place of respect in the world.

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