women

In November 2011 and March 2012, Women'sNet has been following and training a group of community media journalists to use online tools for reporting on climate changes and gender issues issues in partnership with the Media Diversity Development Agency. We were at the Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban last November, you can see the results here.

The follow-up international meeting was held this week in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, and the subsequent negotiations towards an agreement is already attracting criticism from many actors of civil society. Zonibel Woods reports on RH Reality Check:

Brazil, a country that in the past has championed women’s human rights, including reproductive rights, at the global level, has failed women in both Brazil and the world over.

During meetings to finalize the Rio+20 document, Heads of State will adopt in the next few days at Rio+20, delegates agreed on a plan short on vision and big on compromises. After three days of long, drawn-out negotiations, marked with lack of clarity about the process, a document to be signed off by heads of government was presented. Quickly gaveled through by the Brazilian chair, one after another government thanked Brazil for facilitating this document and largely expressed how this was the best they could do. By all accounts, despite the attempts to spin the outcome as a success, this document is neither “the future we want” nor what future generations deserve. In an effort to get consensus at whatever cost, Brazil forgot Rio: the vision and commitments of the Rio Earth Summit held 20 years ago.

Download the report here.

Personal and social communication have changed substantially with the use of ICTs, social networks and text messages. ICTs create new scenarios, new ways for people to live and these reflect real-life problems. Issues of security, privacy, and surveillance are now part of the debate around ICT development. Women should assert their rights here too, with determination and without delay. Women may not have been an active part of ICT development when the conversation started, but the rapid pace of change online, means they need to participate now to ensure that the future of the internet is shaped taking into account women’s rights concerns.

Women know that their core aim should be to support democracy in the political, social and economic fields and, of course, in the field of communications, including the internet. Taking action around internet policies today means dealing with other issues and the rights associated with them that also affect people who are not connected. For example, if surveillance and internet censorship violate human rights in the virtual world, these rights are at risk in the real world too.

In this policy advocacy toolkit, several relevant issues area addressed regarding women’s participation in shaping the internet as a democratic space, where women’s freedom of speech is respected and valued and where they can access and develop crucial information.

The proposed law results from consultations between the state and traditional leadership structures. It ignores the voices of millions of rural women disenfranchised by those structures.

The Traditional Courts Bill is meant to replace the Black Administration Act of 1927 with a law that is constitutional.

Instead, if passed, it will in effect strip between 17 million and 21 million people living in rural South Africa of many of the rights we enjoy in the rest of the country.

About 59% of these people are women, who, along with other members of their communities, will cease to be citizens and exist only as subjects.

As is stands, the bill creates a separate legal system for rural folk, geographically recreating the old Bantustans with no irony on the eve of the centenary of the 1913 Land Act.

We are far from easing the drudgery of women farm workers. But there is growing interest in designing technologies to improve their lives, report M Sreelata and Naomi Antony.

The seemingly simple act of removing the husks from maize cobs by hand is tougher than it sounds. A female worker uses her fingertips on average 522 times, her fingernails 144 times and her palms 55 times for every single kilogram of grain she produces, according to a survey carried out last year by India's Ministry of Agriculture.

Women — whether young or old, healthy or sick — can be found across the developing world working long hours without rest. They pick tea, process tobacco, shell cotton pods, spread fertilisers on fields and transplant rice.

In the developed world, this work is usually done by machines. But in poor countries, much of the labour is done by hand — and a woman's hand at that.

"It's shameful," says Anil Gupta, executive vice-chair of India's National Innovation Foundation (NIF).

"India can send up ten satellites in a single launch in different orbits. The science and technology capacity that we have is enormous. And yet when it comes to problems that women face, there's a huge silence, there is a huge indifference."

The meeting was organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions.

More than 700 participants from 50 countries attended the meeting, which took place in the context of two reports on the role of women in agriculture — one in 2010 from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the other from the World Bank, released in 2011.

The UN report estimates that women contribute 47 per cent of global agricultural labour. But this international average is misleading. In many countries it is far higher; in Lesotho, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, for example, women carry more than 60 per cent of the agricultural workload. In Egypt women make up less than half of the agricultural workforce but account for 85 per cent of unpaid farm labour.

The ILO launches its annual report “World of Work Report 2012: Better Jobs for a Better Economy”. The new study examines the performance of
different countries since the start of the global crisis through the prism of the quantity and quality of jobs.

Women and youth are disproportionately affected by unemployment and job precariousness.....

Non-income dimensions of inequality are on the rise. Additionally, there are non-income dimensions of inequality that are not reflected in the data coefficients. These dimensions of global inequality include inequalities in health, access to education, employment, gender, etc., which, apart from exacerbating poverty, also lead to greater marginalization within society.

The share of informal employment remains high, standing at more than 40 per cent in two-thirds of emerging and developing countries for which data are available. This Report calls for countries to put in place the necessary conditions for a dramatic shift in the current policy approach. It highlights the need for an approach that recognizes the importance of placing jobs at the top of the policy agenda and the need for coherence among macroeconomic, employment and social policies. This requires a significant change in domestic and global governance, which is a complex task. Though the task is demanding, even progressive steps in this direction will be rewarded with better job prospects and a more efficient economy.

Women’sNet and The Media Development & Diversity Agency are proud to present a meerting we are calling ‘The Johannesburg Agreement’, the second phase of a series of workshops to train women journalists from community media (Radio and TV) in the practice of online and mobile citizen journalism in the wake of the COP17 conference and the Climate Change phenomena. The first phase was held in Durban between 28 November and 9 December 2011, a series of activities were facilitated around the COP17 conference, with the aim of empowering women to produce information that offers an alternative to mainstream media coverage. Female journalists working for registered community and small commercial radio stations and television have been invited to participate in The Johannesburg Agreement.

The initiative was developed following the women and media and environment conference organised by the department of environmental affairs in August of 2011 to engage community media with regards to COP17. This conference came twelve years after the adoption of the Kyoto protocol, and was seen as critical milestone to getting parties to sign an agreement that will see lowering of carbon emissions in the world. Our interest as a collective was on telling the story of how climate change affects OUR communities, and in particular women who work on the land and depend on it for their families’ livelihood.