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I was two years old when the Berlin Wall came down. I have never been to Germany, but I understand that, after reunification, that country experienced many of the same stresses that we South Africans face today. People from the East and West who had been torn apart had to grow together again. But they did, and apart from extremist groups, all Germans now see themselves as part of one nation.
Here, talking about our separateness has become an art-form in itself. We spend more time critiquing the walls that divide us than trying to overcome them. We have become paralysed by an acknowledgement of deep-seated cultural and economic differences, yet often fail to recognise the obvious opportunities to connect to each other.
Just think of how mobile phones have improved communication and opened up new possibilities over the past decade. It’s an opportunity literally in our hands. But we’ve failed to grasp it to the full. Other countries have used mobile phones to link opportunity seekers to jobs, finances and further education. Here, cellphone providers penalise those who can only afford basic cellphones by charging higher rates for simpler technologies – like USSD – while the actual operating costs are next to nothing. I keep wondering whether big business is really serious about reuniting our country. I would like to take the CEO’s of Vodacom, MTN and Cell C with me to Rooigrond where I live, so they can understand the power that they have to change the lives of young people.
Ayanda Masondo died on 19 March 2012. She was 20 years old. A student at the University of Johannesburg, Masondo’s body was found leaning against the door in her room at the Benjemijn hostel. The cause of her death was complications from an illegal abortion.
Sadly, Masondo’s fate is all too common. Illegal abortions kill dozens of South African women every year[1].
According to the Saving Mothers report, published earlier this year by the National Committee on Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths (NCCEMD), 4 867 maternal deaths were recorded between 2008 and 2010. 186 of those women died of a septic miscarriage in public healthcare facilities, 23 percent of which were the direct result of an unsafe abortion.
Although there is limited formal data on the subject, the number of deaths caused by unsafe abortion is likely far higher than recorded since the NCCEMD only took into account cases in public health facilities.
Kgomotso Matsunyane and Oratile Moseki It is time to move on and consider the evidence on sex work. We are disappointed to note that the ANC Women’s League has decided to retract what appeared to be support for the decriminalisation of sex work, stating that “more engagement” on the issue was needed. While respecting their decision, SWEAT and our decriminalisation supporters say it’s about time the controversies plaguing the issue were dealt with. There is a shift in focus towards evidence that supports total decriminalisation, and we say that at the heart of these issues are sex worker voices, choices and needs. This information is supreme in that it comes from the experiences of the sex workers themselves. It is a little known fact that the ANC first seriously considered options to legalise sex work 18 years ago in 1996, when “decriminalisation” or alternatively “legalisation of sex work” was discussed.
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.
This 51-page report, published by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, examines the sustainability, ethics, and quality, as well as the role of development co-operation, of citizen journalism in Africa. The study defines this kind of journalism as that produced by non-professionals and notes that it makes use of a wide range of tools including social media, the internet, and mobile phones to fill existing gaps in conventional news coverage. According to the study, new media platforms are changing how people communicate with each other around the world. However, computer ownership and internet access are still the prerogative of the wealthy in much of the African continent, but mobile internet access is on the rise and if current growth rates continue, African mobile phone penetration will reach 100 per cent by 2014. Both mobile phones and the internet provide exciting new opportunities for one-to-one as well as one-to-many communication. One concern raised in this context is the matter of quality standards and a code of ethics.
The New Age reported this week the creation of a new Gender Violence Body by the Minister of of Women, Children, Youth and People with Disabilities to deal with the increasing number of cases of gender-based violence in South Africa. Syabonga Mkhwanazi reports:
The increase in cases of gender-based violence has prompted the Minister of Women, Children, Youth and People with Disabilities, Lulu Xingwana, to set up a new body to deal with the scourge.
Xingwana said that the institution would provide the necessary support structure for the government to help rescue the situation.
The minister said she would launch the National Council against Gender Based Violence in August.
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.
After weeks of countrywide public hearings on which hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ rands were spent, the department of justice and the select committee on security and constitutional development received a rude wake-up call on the controversial Traditional Courts Bill, reports City Press. Most of the provinces either rejected the bill or asked for massive changes. In what can be described as a victory for rural women, who have waged war against the bill since it was tabled in 2008, the department of justice will have to go back to the drawing board.
It’s back to the drawing board for justice department as most provinces reject proposed legislation
The controversial Traditional Courts Bill is still with us – albeit mortally wounded and limping painfully towards the parliamentary cupboard.
After weeks of countrywide public hearings on which hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ rands were spent, the department of justice and the select committee on security and constitutional development received a rude wake-up call this week.
Most of the provinces either rejected the bill or asked for massive changes.
The.Sponge project has recently launched its SMS service for disabled people in South Africa, with the aims of empowering disabled people by offering them crucial information on services. The team working from Port-Elizabeth and serving all provinces of South Africa, receives sms and queries and tries to respond in 12 hours or less refering them to local NGOs or governement services.
Disabled people, especially those living in rural parts of South Africa, often find it difficult to get information about the rehabilitation services that are available to them from government departments and NGOs in their area. This initiative was created for this purpose.
The service can offer advice on disability grants, rehab therapy, obtaining a wheelchair, care giving, mobility trainings, blind skill-typing, sign language tuition, sign language interpreters, special schools for CP children, jobs, mental health support groups, etc.
In a world facing enormous challenges across regions - accelerating climate change, fundamentalisms, militarism, pervasive gender based violence, and rocketing macro-economic instability - the work of social justice movements has never been more important. But as these movements fight for justice, equality and positive social, political and economic transformation, how much attention is paid to the gender power relations within movements themselves? This short clip is from an interactive dialogue with leaders of organisations at the centre of economic justice movements, convened as part of the BRIDGE gender and social movements programme. The aims of the dialogue were to find out more about:
- How economic justice movements understand gender equality and women's economic rights
- How more productive alliances between women's movements and economic justice movements can be built
- What the entry points are for gender justice advocates who want to shape the work of economic justice movements
This short clip, featuring one of the speakers, Shalmali Guttal of Focus on the Global South, gives a taste of the interesting dialogue that took place.
A blog from IDS Knowledge Services' Gender Convenor Jenny Birchall discussing the event is available to read here.
Click on www.herzimbabwe.co.zw and you enter an intimate space that is alive with human stories, provocative ideas and sizzling debates about gender.
The innovative website is the brainchild of Fungai Machirori: journalist, poet, blogger and feminist. Since it exploded onto the scene just three months ago, Her Zimbabwe has attracted more than a thousand followers on Facebook alone – and not all of them are women.
Machirori was inspired to start a gender-focused website late last year, when she attended the World Youth Summit Awards in Austria.She was fired up by the “energy of teenagers”, who were using social media to bring about positive transformation in communities all over the world. She was convinced she could do the same.
Returning to her freezing London flat, she took out her laptop and started brainstorming names for the new website with her Bulawayo-based friend, Tafadzwa Dihwa.
I found myself being confronted with the issue of anonymity and accountability in different ways at the AWID Forum.
At the Feminist Tech Exchange (FTX) and Connect Your Rights events that took place just before the Forum, we discussed about the different and increasingly sophisticated ways that internet technologies have been used to erode any sense of anonymity online.
From facial recognition software being used by governments to identify people who participate in street demonstrations, to the collection, aggregation and sale of our data and activities by internet platform providers that we rely on so heavily for our online engagement such as Google and Facebook - it seems like the internet is significantly shifting from a distributed space of multiplicity to a consolidated space of multinational private enterprise.
The problem with pictures
At the FTX, WITNESS.org shared their development of a software called ObscuraCam, that can enable android smart phone users to easily obscure faces of the people captured through the phone’s camera. This is quite an innovative solution to ensure that privacy and anonymity is designed into the technology, and that we do not make the assumption that everyone is okay with images of their faces being captured and shared into spaces outside of their control.
In a district that cannot be named for fear of reprisal the traditional leader unilaterally controls community resources and access to land. In most instances, where there are projects that rural women have initiated without him, for example a sewing machines project, he tries to undermine the projects and threatens to remove the resources needed for the project, e.g. sewing machines. His ‘justification’: he feels like he has no control over the project and the money involved.
At amaHlubi, RWM is working with an elderly woman who is a widow living alone. Her only source of income is the state social grant. She compliments the grant by growing food in her garden. Cattle from neighbouring eMangweni kept destroying her food garden. In trying to support her, we encouraged her to report the matter to the eMangweni traditional court. She approached the eMangweni traditional court, which is about 10 kilometres from her home, but was sent away because the court “does not speak to a woman”. The court demanded that she be represented by a man. As she does not have a man in her home she cannot return to the court and has stopped growing food in her garden. As RWM, we regard this as an example of the feminisation of poverty
The Traditional Courts Bill currently under discussion in South Africa’s parliament and due to be enacted by the end of 2012 could undermine the basic rights of some of the country’s most vulnerable inhabitants: the 12 million women living in remote rural communities across the country.
The bill aims to "provide more South Africans improved access to justice" by recognising traditional authorities and laws. Through it, traditional leaders in remote areas would be given unilateral power to create and enforce customary law.
The bill sparked an outcry in 2008 when it was first tabled in the National Assembly. But with it due to come into effect at the end of 2012, civil rights groups are becoming increasingly vocal in their demand to have it declared unconstitutional.
The bill will allow traditional leaders to hear civil cases including disputes surrounding contract breach, damage to property, theft and crimen injuria or "unlawfully, intentionally and seriously impairing the dignity of another," if such assault does not result in grievous bodily harm.
But many civil rights groups have slammed the proposed bill. According to Jennifer Williams, director of the Women’s Legal Centre in Cape Town, South Africa, the bill would "place all power in the hands of a single individual – in almost all cases a man – and effectively make him judge, jury and implementer."
More than 70 000 illegal abortions are carried out in Zimbabwe every year, with Zimbabwean women running a 200 times greater risk of dying of abortion complications than their counterparts in South Africa, where the procedure is legal.
"Today you're going to cry." The doctor, prodding Grace roughly with his nicotine-stained fingers, is matter-of-fact, there's no malice in his voice. And, afterwards, when she begs him not to let her see the foetus, he's considerate enough to cover it with a paper towel as it lies in a bloody puddle at the end of the examination table, before helping her to her feet. When he returns to the leather armchair in his consulting room, she notices that he doesn't bother to wash his hands before lighting a cigarette, blowing smoke in her direction as she leans over the desk to hand him his money.
"Be careful not to tell anyone about this," he says as she turns to leave, his eyes slits through the blue blur of cigarette smoke, "the jails are full of women like you."
He was right. That day she did cry. And for many days afterwards. There was clotting and cramps that had her balled up in pain in a corner of the sofa for the next two days, but, mostly, she cried because of the agony of an infection which festered where the doctor's unsterilised equipment had torn at her private parts.
The series of events that led to Grace finding herself in the deserted surgery that late Saturday afternoon once all the regular patients had gone home is irrelevant. She could have been a teenager who fell pregnant the first time she had sex with her boyfriend. But, as it turned out, she was a mature single mother unable to face the birth of a third child she had no means of supporting. Whatever her circumstances, Grace, like many other Zimbabwean women, found herself risking her life and her freedom to terminate a pregnancy she believed impossible to sustain.