At the annual United Nations summit in New York delegates are discussing the eight millenium development goals, set ten years ago. There will be a lot of hot air about putting women at the centre of attaining these goals.
It is undoubtedly true: none of the goals can be achieved without the involvement of women in the developing world, because women generally do most fo the work and raise the children.
However, many of the nations swapping platitudes about improving the position of women remain fundamentally opposed to genuine and meaningful female empowerment. In their societies, where men take the decisions and women labour in the fields, women continue to have very low status. They are denied the right to the money they earn in agriculture, they cannot own or inherit land, and they do not even have the right to the chidlren they have brought into the world.
Human Rights Watch found that one of the reasons HIV spreads in some countries is that infected husbands threaten to torture their own children unless their wives will have sex with them. Their wives have to stay within such abusive relationships because they have no legal rights to their own children. If they want to escape from their husbands, they have to also leave their children behind. As long as this situation persists in so many develooping countries, lip service to women's rights is hypocritical nonsense.
Network for Africa is a registered charity working with communities in the aftermath of conflict and genocide. We especially focus on helping vulnerable women and children. Here we tell their stories.
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