Southern Africa’s march towards gender equality is a mixed bag of small steps in some social and political areas tampered with significant challenges triggered by the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and conflict.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has made steady progress in areas such as women’s participation and representation in politics and decision-making positions, according to the SADC Gender and Development Monitor 2022.
One member state has a woman President (United Republic of Tanzania) and two other countries have achieved gender equality in cabinet (Mozambique and South Africa), with many others not far behind at cabinet level, said the report published by the SADC Secretariat.
“Progress is slower in some member states than others in various areas, but generally all are making progress somewhere, although concerted efforts are required to put in place special measures and mechanism to reach the goals by 2030, especially during the next round of national elections from 2022 to 2026,” it said.
Individual countries such as Namibia have done well in terms of global ranking for promoting the rights of both women and men.
According to the 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF) Gender Gap Report, Namibia ranked eighth globally for gender equality, out of 146 countries.
It was second only to Rwanda, which placed sixth in the world.
The WEF report examined gender gaps in the workforce across four key areas: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival; and political empowerment.
According to the report, a number of southern African countries have done well in various indicators, with Botswana and Zambia ranking among the top 10 nations that have put in place measures to close the gap in the area of economic participation and provision of business opportunities to women and men.
Despite some of these gains, women in the region have to contend with various challenges in the form of the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, natural hazards and rising conflicts on women and girls.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought new challenges to women and girls around the SADC region. Many countries recorded a surge in domestic violence, resulting from economic pressure, confinement and increased tensions in the household.
Domestic violence cases spiked after the pandemic lockdowns of 2020-2021, with a woman now killed every three hours or raped every 25 seconds in South Africa.
This stark reality has galvanised the South African government into action, with President Cyril Ramaphosa this week announcing that the economic empowerment of women remained an important pillar in the battle against the scourge of gender-based violence and femicide.
“We have recognised that unequal access to resources and economic opportunity makes it more difficult for women to escape situations of abuse and violence,” Ramaphosa wrote in his weekly newsletter.
He said the government has embarked on several efforts to transform the economy to the benefit of women and their emancipation.
“As a country, we must shift economic power into the hands of women through, among other things, earmarking 40 percent of all public procurement for women-owned businesses.”
The South African government has trained more than 6,000 women entrepreneurs so that they can tender for government work and successfully provide the required goods and services.
The Industrial Development Corporation has also earmarked about R9 billion (US$487 million) to invest in women-led businesses.
Over the past few years, extreme weather events such as recurring cyclones, droughts and uneven rains have compounded the situation the situation of women across southern Africa, placing an additional burden on women and girls in countries such as Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe.
The current cyclone season is not making life any easier for women and girls in Mozambique, with thousands of hours destroyed and scores of people killed by the two cyclones that have occurred since the beginning of 2023.
Together with the natural hazards, conflicts have displaced thousands of families from their homes, with over two million households forced to flee their homes in Mozambique’s insurgency-hit Cabo Delgado province alone since 2017.
In all these instances, women bear the brunt of the burden since they are forced to take care of the families in terms of provision of food and healthcare for the injured.
JN/APA