Some 150 government ministers, high-level policy makers and experts from 60 least developed, developed and developing countries will meet in Cape Town, South Africa, this week to discuss gender equality and poverty reduction strategies in the least developed countries (LDCs(1)).
The workshop on LDCs: Building Capacities for Mainstreaming Gender in Development Strategies is being organized by the Government of South Africa and UNCTAD from 21 to 23 March. It will focus on linkages between poverty eradication and gender equality and the need to mainstream the gender perspective in national policies and programmes. These subjects have long been at the heart of the international debate on development but are particularly relevant for the LDCs, which have limited capacity to integrate gender equality into their poverty reduction strategies. The workshop comes at a time when the international community is paying renewed attention to these countries, particularly in view of the forthcoming Third United Nations Conference on the LDCs, to be held in Brussels from 14 to 20 May. The workshop is one of the events taking place as part of the preparatory process for the Conference.
Lindiwe Hendricks, Deputy Minister of Trade of South Africa, will chair the workshop, which will also be addressed by Alec Erwin, South Africa´s Minister of Trade; Angela King, UN Special Adviser on Gender Issues; and Anna K. Tibaijuka, Executive Director of the UN Centre for Human Settlements (HABITAT). The workshop is being attended by representatives of governments, international organizations, NGOs, academia and the private sector and is being sponsored by the governments of Denmark, Finland, Japan and Sweden and by the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa.
Discussions will focus on how to develop gender-sensitive national budgets, collect gender-disaggregated statistics to feed policy changes, and build national capacities for gender-sensitive policy-making. One session will be devoted to how gender discrimination hampers the development of national and global trade, and how discrimination can be worsened by gender-insensitive trade policies.
The Women´s Development Bank of South Africa will organize a special event on women as the drivers of poverty alleviation and the impact of micro credit, chaired by First Lady Zanele Mbeki, who is also the Director of the Bank. Another event on the celebration of human rights in South Africa will be organized and hosted by the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa.
The outcome of the workshop -- concrete recommendations and project proposals -- will be presented at the Brussels conference during a panel to be organized jointly by UNCTAD, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Government of Japan. The workshop´s outcome will also contribute to the Programme of Action to be adopted in Brussels, a blueprint for the development of the LDCs over the coming decade.
Highlights of gender inequality(2)
- More than half of the 700 million inhabitants of the LDCs are women. And more than half of the poorest people in these countries are women, a growing number of them single, unskilled and destitute, who can barely feed themselves or their children.
- The number of female-headed households both in the LDCs and worldwide is growing as a result of war, civil unrest, AIDS, male migration, and traditional and cultural values which contribute to discrimination against women.
- Women all over the world are underpaid or not paid at all. This is particularly true in the developing countries, where the vast majority of women (as many as 88% of all women in Tanzania, for example) do unpaid family work, or work for a pittance in the informal sector. In the LDCs as a whole, women represent 83% of workers in agriculture and yet most of them do not own land.
- The average percentage of female adult illiteracy in the LDCs was 59 in 1998, ranging from a high of 92.6% in Niger to a low of 4% in Maldives.
- Last year, women held only 10.7% of seats in LDC parliaments.
