Last Updated: Thursday, 9 January 2003
Focus on saving Africa’s women
A combination of famine and Aids is threatening the backbone of Africa, the
women, who keep African societies going and whose work makes up the economic
foundation of rural communities.
For decades, we have known that the best way for Africa to thrive is to ensure that
its women have the freedom, power and knowledge to make decisions affecting
their own lives and those of their families and communities.
At the United Nations, we have always understood that our work for development
depends on building a successful partnership with the African farmer and her
husband.
Study after study has shown that there is no effective development strategy in
which women do not play a central role.
When women are fully involved, the benefits can be seen immediately: families are
healthier; they are better fed; their income, savings and re-investment go up. And
what is true of families is true of communities and, eventually, of whole countries.
But today, millions of African women are threatened by two simultaneous
catastrophes: famine and Aids.
More than 30 million people are now at risk of starvation in Southern Africa and
the Horn of Africa. All of these predominantly agricultural societies are also
battling serious Aids epidemics. This is no coincidence: Aids and famine are
directly linked.
Because of Aids, farming skills are being lost, agricultural development efforts are
declining, rural livelihoods are disintegrating, productive capacity to work the land
is dropping and household earnings are shrinking all while the cost of caring for
the ill is rising exponentially.
At the same time, HIV infection and Aids are spreading dramatically and
disproportionately among women.
A United Nations report released last month shows that women now make up 50
percent of those infected with HIV worldwide and in Africa that figure is now 58
percent. Today, Aids has a woman's face.
Aids has already caused immense suffering by killing almost 2,5 million Africans
this year alone. It has left 11 million African children orphaned since the epidemic
began.
Now it is attacking the capacity of these countries to resist famine by eroding
those mechanisms that enable populations to fight back the coping abilities
provided by women.
In famines, before the Aids crisis, women proved more resilient than men. Their
survival rate was higher, and their coping skills were stronger. Women were the
ones who found alternative foods that could sustain their children in times of
drought.
Because droughts happened once a decade or so, women who had experienced
previous droughts were able to pass on survival techniques to younger women.
Women are the ones who nurture social networks that can help spread the burden
in times of famine.
But today, as Aids is eroding the health of Africa's women; it is eroding the skills,
experience and networks that keep their families and communities going.
Even before falling ill, a woman will often have to care for a sick husband, thereby
reducing the time she can devote to planting, harvesting and marketing crops.
When her husband dies, she is often deprived of credit, distribution networks or
land rights. When she dies, the household will risk collapsing completely, leaving
children to fend for themselves.
The older ones, especially girls, will be taken out of school to work in the home or
the farm. These girls, deprived of education and opportunities, will be even less
able to protect themselves against Aids.
Because this crisis is different from past famines, we must look beyond relief
measures of the past.
Merely shipping in food is not enough. Our effort will have to combine food
assistance and new approaches to farming with treatment and prevention of HIV
and Aids.
It will require creating early warning and analysis systems that monitor both HIV
infection rates and famine indicators. It will require new agricultural techniques,
appropriate to a depleted work force. It will require a renewed effort to wipe out
HIV-related stigma and silence.
It will require innovative, large scale ways to care for orphans, with specific
measures that enable children in Aids-affected communities to stay in school.
Education and prevention are still the most powerful weapons against the spread
of HIV.
Above all, this new international effort must put women at the centre of our
strategy to fight Aids.
Experience suggests that there is reason to hope. The recent United Nations report
shows that HIV infection rates in Uganda continue to decline. In South Africa,
infection rates for women under 20 have started to decrease. In Zambia, HIV rates
show signs of dropping among women in urban areas and younger women in rural
areas.
In Ethiopia, infection levels have fallen among young women in the centre of
Addis Ababa.
We can and must build on those successes and replicate them elsewhere. For that,
we need leadership; partnership and imagination from the international community
and African governments. If we want to save Africa from two catastrophes, we
would do well to focus on saving Africa's women. — Wireless File.
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"Ivinicus factus sum veritabem diceus." ( I have become an enemy for speaking the truth ) St Paul!
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Mitayo Potosi
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