Beijing+25 – planning for gender equality

Its been a while since I wrote on my blog, so I welcome myself back to the blogosphere. Well, many 

events have passed without my commentary. But it should not be surprising to you the event that has brought me out of my hibernation.  An issue dear to my heart and to the development of our continent. The issue of our progress to meeting the Beijing goals.

Where were you when you first heard of the Beijing Declaration? Do you know its been 25 years since then?

Yes, next year 2020 will be twenty five years after the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BfA) was passed. Even as a fifteen year old in 1995, I recognised the importance of the event. And it would take another 10 or so years before I sat in Prof. Dzodzi Tsikata’s Gender and Development Class (popularly called from WID to GAD) at ISSER, but even then, I believe this event is what made me a feminist. For us young girls growing up in the post Beijing era, we were identified by how vocal we were in which case, we were labelled as feminists and thus ‘hard aka talkative’ girls.

I am happy to note that the values and commitments made at the Beijing platform continue to be held in high regard and continue to shape the feminist discourse on the African context. I am happy also to note that there exists a group of hard working and committed feminists and activists across the continent who continue to work tirelessly for the implementation and recognition of all the critical areas under the Beijing Declaration.  This does not surprise me at all as African women have a strong history of mobilising themselves across the continent. See my earlier post on the Pan African Womens Organisation (PAWO), which is older than the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

The African Union Agenda 2063 makes a strong case for the role of women, young women and children in shaping the destiny of Africa as actors and not as passive recipients of aid, training and charity. So to see a pan African wide effort at consolidating our gains towards the 2020 event was indeed heart warming.  In the workshop which took place in Accra in August, I identified myself as the ‘slim middle’ a generation between the ‘elders’ or those who were actually at the help of planning and attended the 1995 event itself and the ‘digital generation’, the current force for change who use technology to achieve their aims. 

As we work towards planning the Beijing+25 event in 2020, these are my top 3 recommendations to ensuring that the Declaration continues to exist and makes a lasting change.

Number 1- the intergenerational torch hand over. 

We need to create and maintain an intergenerational link between the generation of women activists who were actually in Beijing and the new digital feminists. We need to identify the common threads connecting our generational narratives – that patriarchy is still very much intact- and use that as a rallying point for sustaining the changes gained and creating new standards for women’s rights. Without this focus, we run the risk of Beijing becoming a theoretical paper based document that does not resonate with the rest of the continents women. One way to do this is the realisation that there are different representations of feminism but one overall goal- to break the hold of patriarchy. 

Number 2- the hard facts and the figures.   

We need to consciously build a robust and strong global data collection and analysis system that monitors and tracks and analyses the progress towards the achievements of the BPfA. This system should be globally agreed and form the basis for sharing of anecdotal stories, qualitative and quantitative changes, key success stories and challenges. An example of such a global data system is the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under which each goal has specific indicators, targets and milestones for achievements. We are aware of the successes achieved in the past 25 years- first woman this and first woman that. My personal favourite being Madam Zuma and her time at the African Union Commission. But are they enough? There continue to be more women in slave bondage now than any other period in history, technology has made it easier to traffic women and girls across the globe; climate change and rapid urbanisation has changed the situation for pastoralists and traditional communities; wars and famine affect women and girls the most, with deplorable living conditions in refugee camps. Rape continues to be a weapon of war. We need an audacious agenda for societal transformation- now and soon. And require the skills to be able to tell the world what has changed positively, what is still yet to be transformed and this transformation will look like. Enough of the rhetoric.

Number 3- linkages, networks and connections. 

We must focus on the intra connectedness of the 12 critical areas and not see them as stand-alone  deliverables. I will be the first person to confess to an unfinished understanding of the full picture in relation to the 12 critical areas identified in Beijing. But my layman’s reading shows a leaning towards ‘siloism’ or the temple analogy where the critical areas stand as columns with no interlinkages. But as I said, I stand to be corrected. The interconnectedness of the critical areas must also be linked up strategically to other more recent conventions such as the SDGS and in the case of Africa, the almighty Agenda 2063. How do we carve out the areas of convergence in a manner to supports the overall objective? This is important to takeing forward the discussions.

In conclusion

 The asks in Beijing do not need to be overhauled, they do not need to be revamped or changed. All those ideas continue to be relevant to the feminist struggles today as they were 25 years ago. We just need to keep our eyes on the ball and ensure the next generation have the tools and the interest to keep the fire burning. Kudos to our elders who took the bold steps. As they say somewhere ‘Aluta Continua’. 

About the author:

Teiko Sabah is the 2013 Mo Ibrahim African Leaders Fellow with the UNECA. She is interested in Africa and pan Africanism. She writes a monthly blog on pan Africanism on https://teikosabah.blogspot.com

 

Oppong Weah- my inspiration for Africa!

I was naturally a pessimist. Full blown and unapologetic. The glass was always half empty for me. The-sky-is -falling, ‘what good can come out of Bethlehem’ sort of person. Why not? Living in Africa in itself a big risk- the 6 killer diseases range freely here, armed robbers and 419ners, civil war , drought, famine, you name it. Every day was a blessing. Seriously.

 It also didn’t help that my training made me so pessimistic. NGOs always base their projects on the ubiquitous, pervasive and ever present (3 words meaning the same thing) ‘problem statement’. This very important part of a project proposal is designed to state in very graphic and detailed manner what is wrong with any chosen project, making the case for donors to therefore see the need to put in their money to solve this problem.  In a competitive fundraising world, the more detailed, graphic and gross your problem statement, the higher the probability that you will get funding for two, three or five years. During the project period, 50% of your time is spent on writing reports, lessons learnt and attending conferences where you learnt new methods to better identify, state and clarify the problem. This puts you in a better position at end of project to restate the emerging problems and trends for which you require another two, three or five years of funding to address. And the cycle continued

So it came as a surprise to me when my mentor and friend Carlos Lopes saw, and continue to see hope, in the Africa Rising agenda.

‘Really?’ I said, ‘is Africa really rising? From what and to where?’ and how long will it last?

Carlos is the unapologetic optimist about Africa. In Africa, he saw only positive prospects even through the times of the Libyan uprising which saw the death of Muammar Gaddafi…and the loud silence of the African union (they were more interested in planning AU@50, in my opinion), pirates in the Somalian waters, almost civil way in Cote d’Ivoire and even Ebola in Guinean, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Carlos had unrelenting hope in Africa’s youth, promising economic growth, social uprising, technological progress and the resilience of Africa’s women. For Carlos, there was no ‘problem statement’, only ‘the promise of the future’.

Eventually, some of that optimism rubbed off on me. But it took me some time to unlearn the tricks of my trade, which I had perfected over 15 years of writing proposals and to which I had a full tool box of… (Ahem) tools such as problem tree, solution tree, the 5 ‘W’s, fish bone or Ishikawa, log frame, outcome mapping, PEA, PEST, STEP, PESTLE, PRA, RBA etc. I have re-leant that  ‘Africa Rising is not a rhetoric. It actually is happening.

So it was not a surprise that the runoff for the Liberian Election was being delayed by a court case. George Oppong Weah and the current VP in a legal stand-off. Of course, incumbency will always work to the advantage of the incumbent. However I still believe in the mantra of ‘power to the people’. Kudos to the people and the institutions of Liberia who have made it possible for an illiterate footballer to rise from the slums to become President.

I am even more intrigued by Oppong Weah himself and his tenacity in all this. So the analysis twelve years ago, when he stood for elections for the first time, was that even with his millions, he did not have a high school certificate, let alone university degree. We heard the conspiracy stories which got him to lose the run off, déjà vu, in favour of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. However, in the twelve years when he was in opposition, he did not just stand on the side-lines of history waiting his turn to be president; he did one thing that I highly commend. He ‘sharpened the saw’.

Stephen Covey, in his widely acclaimed book- the 7 habits of highly effective people, states the seventh habit as ‘sharpening the saw’. This habit is about learning, relearning and feeding back the learning into any skill or trade you have. This is calls ‘learn, commit, do’.  Covey postulates, and rightfully so, that it is not enough to move from dependence to independence (the first three habits) to interdependence (the next three habits)  but also to continuously improve yourself in both personal and professional spheres of influence… in other words, to ‘sharpen the saw’. Anyone who cooks knows that even the sharpest knife will become blunt with constant use and that once in a while, it is important to sharpen your knives to be able to continue to get the most out of it. 

I was privileged to do the entire 7 habits course in one of my previous roles. This training supports leaders to understand and to use practical methods to ensure they continue to be highly effective. One of my course mates did not agree with the underlying philosophy behind Stephen Covey’s work. His philosophy that a person, by his own skills, can become highly effective by himself, this friend believed that the systems and structures, i.e. the environment in which a person lived in, had a lot to contribute to a person’s success in a way that made the 7 habits deeply flawed. I agree with him on that but also note that the extent to which a person can be successful involves both the environment, and how a person understands her surrounding environment enough to utilise the 7 habits to her advantage. But I digress…back to the new President. 

During the twelve years Oppong Weah was in opposition, he sharpened his saw. We are told that he went to school, became a senator, run as vice president, etc. in some he was successful, in others he was not, but in all, he learnt lessons and used them to move on the upward spiral of learn, commit, do with every experience giving him a deeper understanding of these habits. In all truth, I think 12 years of sharpening the saw will make Oppong Weah a better president. Sometimes, we have to be grateful for the time spent in the wilderness of life.

Oppong Weah is an important jigsaw in the African Union’s vision of: “An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in global arena.” Oppong Weah is my inspiration for 2018. Africa can indeed become prosperous by us and for the benefit of our citizens.

For a self-confessed pessimist now turned Weah-timist (and cautiously optimist), I am blown away by the trend of change on the continent. One victory a year. In 2017, it was Nana Addo Akuffo Addo becoming President of Ghana after 8 years in opposition, in 2018, the story of democratic change is in Liberia. I have hope for Cameroun, Togo, Rwanda and almighty Uganda. The winds of change are blowing, bringing with it hope, positive change, stability and prosperity for all African citizens.

On a wonderful aside, I recently read a book about the meaning of Chinese names and how they are linked to the epoch in which persons were born or to the hopes that their parents had for them, very much in line with African names. One name that resonated with me was Zhen Hua meaning Vibrate the Universe. I look forward to Mr. Oppong Weah vibrating the universe, beyond his boundaries!

Happy New Year, Mr. President! And to you, I give the words of Cabral ‘…tell no lies claim no easy victories, …’.

About the author:

Teiko Sabah is the 2013 Mo Ibrahim African Leaders Fellow with the UNECA. She is interested in Africa and pan Africanism. She writes a monthly blog on pan Africanism on https://teikosabah.blogspot.com