07 August 2009
Women Are Making Progress in Africa, but Many Obstacles Remain
An interview with Ambassador Melanne Verveer
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to seven African countries is a sign of the Obama administration’s commitment to partner with Africa and help its 800 million people realize their full potential. Traveling with the secretary is Ambassador Melanne Verveer, the first-ever U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues.
In this exclusive interview with America.gov, Verveer talks about gender-based violence, the promise and the obstacles facing African women, and her own work to further the human rights of women.
QUESTION: During your trip to Africa with Secretary of State Clinton, will you be able to point out any concrete progress in ending violence against women?
AMBASSADOR VERVEER: Violence against women is endemic around the world, and no less so in Africa. In DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], in the conflict environment and the atmosphere of impunity that have developed, gender-based violence has become an urgent humanitarian crisis. The State Department has drawn on resources in offices that focus on Africa, offices that focus on development and humanitarian assistance and on helping refugees, and other USG [U.S. Government] agencies and resources to formulate a comprehensive road map to address the immediate needs in DRC: prevention of violence, protection of women and girls, treatment for the survivors of violence, and prosecution of the perpetrators.
For example, to help prevent violence, we are working to increase the number of female police officers and to boost training for officers of both sexes. We are working to incorporate human rights training in all Global Peace Operations Initiatives, so that peacekeepers are trained to intervene and to report incidents of violence and don’t themselves become part of the problem. To protect women and girls, we’ve advocated for MONUC [the United Nations Organization Mission in the DRC] to increase the number of full-time protection officers in the east and to establish more mobile units.
On treatment, we’re funding programs, through USAID [the United States Agency for International Development], to strengthen health systems in North and South Kivu provinces and to establish Community Care Centers that provide physical treatment, including fistula repair and HIV and STD screening, with mental health care and legal assistance, all in one location. To bring offenders to justice and to help end the culture of impunity, we’re working with the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau and the Women’s Justice and Empowerment Initiative, as well as with the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] and USAID, helping to fund their efforts at the community level to build capacity and support for prosecution. It’s a complex problem, and at the heart of it is women’s fundamental inequality in the DRC. We can’t change that overnight. But with the help of our other USG and international partners, and the people of DRC, we CAN change it.
QUESTION: Are there examples in Africa that this trip will acknowledge of women successfully gaining equal footing with men to promote and enjoy economic and social progress in their countries?
AMBASSADOR VERVEER: We can point to some areas in which gains have been made. Unfortunately, however, there’s no country on earth in which women have successfully gained equal footing with men in the political, economic or social realm. There are some issues that are gaining traction, but there are also issues — notably, violence — in which progress has been far too slow. Some of the gains are fragile. In many countries in Africa, as in other economically emerging parts of the world, women had been making some gains as the global economy grew. With the global downturn, many of these new jobs have been lost. These losses have the potential to have long-term consequences. If, for instance, cash-strapped families decide to save money by cutting back on their daughters’ education, we could be looking, down the road, at a missing cohort of educated, skilled female workers in Africa. However, there are other areas of economic success in Africa: There have been successful efforts to grow women’s economic opportunity by removing obstacles, like lack of property rights, or regulatory schemes that impede women’s participation. Women are also making great strides raising the profitability of artisan-related businesses and tapping global markets for their products. Women drive GDP [gross domestic product], and their participation in the economy is critical to poverty alleviation and economic progress.
Politically, we can point to good news as well. Rwanda, which reserves 30 percent of parliamentary seats for women, now has a 56 percent female legislative majority – the first country in the world to achieve that benchmark. In Liberia, under the dynamic President [Ellen] Johnson Sirleaf, a number of women are serving in the Cabinet; including the Ministry of Justice, Commerce and Agriculture. South Africa also has many women in ministerial and other prominent roles. Judges in Tanzania are making a difference in the way cases involving violence against women are prosecuted. These are gains in themselves, and they also tend to translate into economic and social gains as the elected women shine a light on unexamined and outmoded laws.
QUESTION: You have a long and impressive resume in promoting women’s interests during your work in the private sector. What do you hope to accomplish in your ground-breaking position as ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues?
AMBASSADOR VERVEER: Thank you! There’s so much to accomplish, but there’s also so much opportunity to make real progress. When President Obama created this office and my position in April, it was the first time an ambassador-at-large had been appointed to head these issues. It was unprecedented, and it reflects the importance this administration places on women’s issues.
Our office works for nothing less than the full social, economic and political equality of women around the world. Secretary Clinton put it best when, as first lady, she addressed the U.N. Fourth World Conference in Beijing in 1995 and said: “Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights.” That’s something that should be so simple, and not at all controversial. And yet, this principle is violated every day, all around the world.
When you work for women’s equality, all the issues are interconnected. For example, this administration has made women’s health, especially maternal health, a priority. Every minute, a woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth from largely preventable causes, or has lasting physical damage done by giving birth without a skilled attendant present. The President’s Global Health Initiative is our best chance of helping the world achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goal on maternal health, which aims to establish a 75 percent reduction in maternal mortality by 2015. And the thing about healthy mothers is that they create healthy families. Their daughters and sons are more likely to have proper nutrition and to get a good education. And those educated girls not only help the economies of their countries — according to the World Bank, educating women increases their wages by as much 20 percent for every additional year of schooling — but they also become empowered to make better health decisions for themselves and their families.
So our office is working on the full range of women’s issues: freedom from violence — not just domestic violence, but also rape, harassment, human trafficking, so-called “honor” killings, genital mutilation, child marriage, and more — as well as access to healthcare, to education, to leadership training, and to increased political and economic participation. Gains in any one area build upon and help us achieve gains in the others. It’s a challenging task, but one thing that makes it easier, I think, is that, increasingly, people see that these aren’t just issues of concern to women in a few countries. These are issues that affect all of us, that affect our national security — because no country can be free and stable, with a strong civil society, if half its population is left behind. These are issues that have to do with the kind of world that we want to live in. The State Department is making women’s issues a central part of our foreign policy both because it’s the right thing to do and because it’s the smart thing to do: We can’t solve the challenges facing the world today without drawing on the skills and talents of everyone, women and men together.
Learn more:
“Conflicts in Africa Exacerbate Gender-Based Atrocities”
Africa: Partnering for Peace and Prosperity
Biography of Ambassador Melanne Verveer
