Women's role vital for development

Ethiopia and Africa will never achieve development without the full empowerment of women, a conference in Addis Ababa heard on Tuesday. Ethiopia's Minister for Youth and Culture Teshome Toga said women in Africa had consistently been denied their rights. "In most African countries, the majority of poor people are women," he told the conference organised by the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR). He said African countries were lagging behind because they were under-utilising the resources of half of their population by failing to let women fully participate in society. "While they contribute 70 to 80 percent of labour, they own a fraction of the land and other important resources," he pointed out. "In most countries they are the majority who participate in the voting but only a fraction of them get voted or appointed to leadership positions that influence policies." In Ethiopia only 42 of the country’s 548-plus MPs are women. Just two women sit as ministers in the cabinet. "We need to work hard to remove cultural, religious and other barriers that hinder recognition and acceptance of women as equal and competent leaders like their male counterparts," Teshome stressed. He added that his ministry was ideally placed to educate young people on the important role of women and said society and culture must adapt to accept women on an equal basis. The two-day conference, called Creating an Enabling Environment for Gender Responsive Leadership in Ethiopia, aims to redress the balance. Meron Genene, a gender specialist with the IIRR, said in most African countries, half the population was lagging behind. "We are not developing because we do not have equal participation of women," she told IRIN. "This means a country is stunted because you are not taking advantage of all your resources." She said role models should play an important part in shaping the views of society, citing gold medal winning Ethiopian female athletes. Meron called for better education for women as the key to empowerment and said that greater access to credit could also help. The IIRR is running projects to help improve the leadership skills of women and has worked with Ethiopian female MPs. It also believes that leadership roles can be improved in family households and within local communities. But Meron argued that traditional practices were preventing the empowerment of women. She said violence against women was still prolific, but within the country it was a taboo and so was never discussed. Huge numbers of women, believed to be more than 50 percent, have also been the victims of female circumcision, she added. According to IIRR statistics, up to 60 percent of women often suffer from inadequate nutrition and around 75 percent are illiterate compared to less than 50 percent of men. The two-day conference, run in conjunction with the Dutch embassy, aims to highlight the need to improve gender issues within Ethiopia and increase the leadership skills of women.