Johannesburg - Conflicts and crises on the continent will not again knock the theme of women’s economic empowerment off the agenda of the African Union’s biannual summit now taking place in Sandton.
Not if Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi has anything to do with it. “Let’s see every crisis as an opportunity,” Fraser-Moleketi, special envoy on gender for the African Development Bank (ADB), said on Wednesday.
“Women’s Empowerment and Development Towards Africa’s Agenda 2063” was the theme of the last AU summit in Addis Ababa in January. But a full discussion on it was postponed to this summit because a rash of conflicts and crises on the continent - such as the Boko Haram Islamist extremist insurgency in northern Nigeria and the ebola outbreak in West Africa - preoccupied the leaders in Addis Ababa.
However, many analysts have predicted that new crises - such as that sparked by Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza to seek a third term in office despite the two-term limits in his country’s constitution - will again eclipse the theme of women’s empowerment at this summit.
But Fraser-Moleketi, who was a minister in former President Thabo Mbeki’s cabinet, disagreed. She is at the summit to participate in the 2nd High Level Panel on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. The panel focussed on ways to ensure that African women received the necessary financing to participate effectively in agriculture.
She said she did not believe that crises had even pushed women’s empowerment off the agenda of the January AU summit.
“To the contrary it was the January summit which adopted the theme. But what we saw was that as we dealt with ebola, we also took into account the socio-economic implications for women.
“And you will recall that these market women were most affected because they sold the bush meat. And from our perspective as the ADB - and the AU also played a similar role - we looked at developing a special ebola infrastructure fund to help women in the three affected areas. (Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea) “
The fund was intended not only to help the women return to survival mode but to lift them higher in the agricultural business.
“So let’s see every crisis as an opportunity.”
In Burundi she said that the ADB was involved in a study which looked at the four Cs - coffee, cassava, cocoa and cotton.
The aim was to support the women coffee producers, especially in selling niche coffees to particular markets.
In general she said the time for women’s economic empowerment had arrived, more so than at the time of the big international women’s conference in Beijing 21 years ago.
That was because the public sector, the private sector and the public at large had since been forced to acknowledge and recognise the role of women, especially in the marketplace, because women were not only the largest bloc of consumers, they were also important producers.
“There’s also a need to use the human capital of all on the continent, including the human capital of women. The time has arrived for women on the African continent in the sense that the chair of the African Union Commission is a woman. She has ensured that this year’s theme is Women’s Economic Empowerment.”
Wednesday’s high level panel was focusing on financial inclusion for women in agriculture because agriculture was the largest employer of women.
“And we also know from a food security perspective that women are responsible for ensuring 70% of food in Africa is on tables.”
Yet they were still mainly smallholders, eking out livelihoods on small plots.
“And there’s a need to move this further across the value chain,” Fraser-Moleketi said, including increasing the access of Africa’s women farmers to financing, improving infrastructure, improving the access of women to land and helping them meet the required standards for intra-regional trade in agriculture in Africa and even global trade.
She noted that across most of Africa, women did not have equal access to land, in part because of unequal inheritance laws and customs.
The financial development institutions had a responsibility to help finance women’s agriculture and she believed they would do so. “And this comes just before the Financing for Development summit that will take place in Addis Ababa in July this year.
“And there is a need to review the way in which financing is skewed generally, globally..
“Within the African Development Bank we’re looking at how we can structure our project financing to draw women in to a greater extent. But in addition to that we also say there is a need for a financing facility for African women economic empowerment, continent wide.
“We’re looking for ways to crowd in public and private sector funding to make this happen. And in so doing we’re not letting any financial institution off the hook. Or any government off the hook.”
She said a working group which included top women corporate CEOS was examining this initiative.
Asked to rate the success of efforts to integrate women into economies in Africa on a scale of 1 to 100, Fraser-Moleketi said: “In Africa we are at about 50.
“But if we really want this to be part of Africa’s inclusive and green growth story, then we’re probably more at 30 %. What we’re going to do is use this year to catapult women.
“Because we are saying we have to change the financing story around by 2025.”
ANA