South Africa

The ICT industry is losing the talent of skilled women who can bring to it a richness and diversity of thought and perspective and can help alleviate the shortage of skills, which is exacerbated by their lack of participation.  Without women as an integral part of the workforce, the ICT industry is bereft of many potential contributors to the formulation of government and research policy and the development of technology that benefits communities as a whole; it is also deprived of a broader set of perspectives in the design of critical information systems.

The informal economy has been characterized by a high level of participation by women.  Therefore a discussion of the informal economy is intertwined with the work of women.  Results of the October (199) Household Survey showed that among employed women, the largest portion was in elementary (19.4%), domestic (17.8%) and clerical occupations (16.3%) whereas among employed men the largest portion (19.6%) was in artisan and craft related occupations.  However both women's work and the informal sector have largely been discounted as marginal to the ‘real' economy and therefore been historically neglected in most scholarship on the economy and the labour market.

Indigenous land tenure arrangements in South Africa have generally consisted of communal ownership. In this system, who benefited from the land depended on their status as family or clan head. The colonial regime dispossessed Africans of land in favour of European arrivals, or defined family property as ancestral property in which the senior males of the head family were taken as the owners with the rights to inherit. The post-apartheid government conceptualised acess to land for the previously disadvantaged as a human right. However, in practice, it remained tolerant of (distorted) customary law which privileged male access to land. In 2005 the case in the Constitutional Court Bhe v Magistrate revolutionised the law by rejecting customs which discriminated against black women's inheritance rights. This decision is likely to have a positive impact on black women's capacity to own land.

This resource provides relevant knowledge to facilitate mainstreaming gender-responsive approaches into reproductive health programmes, and the inclusion of specific aspects of gender inequality and disadvantage into national policy frameworks. It focuses primarily on health, particularly reproductive health; on HIV/AIDS; and on violence against women as it relates to health services.

Gender responsive budgeting (GRB) is budgeting responsive budgeting (GRB) is budgeting that integrates a gender perspective and tracks how budgets respond to gender equality and women's rights requirements. This entails examining not only actual allocations and revenue raising measures but also budgeting systems, budgeting processes and looking at the roles of the various actors throughout the process. It also entails investing in making available mechanisms, guidelines, data and indicators that enable gender equality advocates to track progress, benefit incidence and show how supposedly gender neutral budgets impact women.

Independent enterprise is one of the most important vehicles for the empowerment of women in South Africa today. The Business Partners' vision is to enable more female entrepreneurs to take up meaningful roles in the business community. To this end, Business Partners has, as part of its strategy to increase its footprint in the women owned SME arena, made a strategic decision to create the Business Partners Women's Fund. By assisting women with capital, skill and knowledge, resulting in wealth and job creation for themselves and their teams and thus contributing to the growth of the economy, the Business Partners Women's Fund is at forefront of shifting the dynamics of the SME market to embody gender equality.

Countries should act to empower women and should take steps to eliminate inequalities between men and women as soon as possible by adopting appropriate measures to improve women's ability to earn income beyond traditional occupations, achieve economic self-reliance and ensure women's equal access to the labour market, and social security systems.

South Africa's definition of and goals towards achieving gender equality are guided by a vision of human rights which incorporates acceptance of equal and inalienable rights of all women and men.

The issue of gender equality has been on our agenda since the formation of COSATU. We will always be engaged in relentless efforts to fight discrimination and subordination in the federation, affiliates and in the workplace.

Most women working in the informal sector are home based workers or street vendors.