5 - 11 April 2001
Issue No.528
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 5 - 11 April 2001 Issue No.528 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
It is time to pay attention to the other half of the country's population. Reem Leila reviews the evidence
A helping hand
The UN Development Fund for Women has a new strategy for improving women's status
Ever heard of UNIFEM? Maybe not -- but the UN Development Fund for Women, established in Jordan in 1994, has been working to help women in Egypt since 1998. UNIFEM's mandate is women's empowerment and gender equality. It works to ensure the participation of women at all levels of development planning and practice, and acts as a catalyst within the UN system to support efforts that link the needs and concerns of women to other critical issues on the national, regional, and global agendas, and to foster a multilateral policy dialogue on women's empowerment.
Now UNIFEM has adopted a new programme strategy based on the promotion of "women's rights, opportunities and capacities." Within this framework, the fund focuses on three immediate concerns: strengthening women's economic capabilities in the context of the new trade agenda and the emergence of new technologies; engendering governance and leadership initiatives to increase women's participation in the decision-making processes that shape their lives; and promoting women's human rights to eliminate all forms of violence and transform development into a more peaceful, equitable and sustainable process.
According to Haifa Abu Ghazaleh, UNIFEM's regional programme director for Western Asia, UNIFEM's work in other Arab countries has been carried out over two phases. The first, launched in 1996 after the Beijing Conference, "translated policy statements into action, to be merged in the national strategy of the Arab countries." The outcome of phase I, which ended in 1997, was the formulation of the national strategy and action plan. Phase II, begun in 1998, will be completed at the end of this year, and has focused on enhancing the role of women as well as NGO networking.
In Egypt, UNIFEM is part of a joint programme involving the UN Development Programme, UNICEF, and the National Council for Women (NCW) and aimed at formulating a national strategy for the improvement of women's status. As one prong of this strategy, UNIFEM Western Asia has commissioned the Alliance of Arab Women to produce a video film titled "Thorn," documenting violence against women and following individual case studies. The film will be aired on Egyptian TV and will be shown in other countries of the region as well. "This will help people understand the danger of violence committed against women," says Abu Ghazaleh.
UNIFEM has also assisted the Ministry of Social Affairs in compiling data on programmes and projects focused on women and development; on another front, it has organised training programmes for members of the NCW and NGO staff, who recently participated in a workshop about the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and Shari'a. This theme was especially important, notes Abu Ghazaleh, since most of Egypt's reservations regarding CEDAW were based on the belief that some of the convention's articles conflicted with the Shari'a. The Sheikh of Al-Azhar attended, and participants discovered that several articles Egypt had been reluctant to endorse in fact do not contravene Islamic law at all.
Abu Ghazaleh believes that it is now "time to work on amending all the legislation that contains discrimination against women. We must work on economic empowerment, because women and children are the victims of everything. Most of the Arab countries' national development plans have been unsuccessful because they ignored women's role. In Egypt, the situation is different: there is now full acknowledgment of women's role, and this will ensure the success of the national development plan."
Smooth sailing is not guaranteed, however, if one is to judge from past experience: UNIFEM has faced many obstacles in the course of its work in the Arab world. "Sometimes we have to change our plan due to the difference in the priorities of our counterpart. We often discuss these, and we discover that there is a disparity. Usually UNIFEM amends its plan to suit the needs of our counterpart, but these demands must coincide with our framework because there are areas that we cannot work in. Most of the time we try with our counterpart to overcome these obstacles," explains Abu Ghazaleh.
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