Encourage girls to prioritise education: iLIVE

As the world celebrates the 101st International Women’s Day, as women we must assess how far we have come in our battle for equality and development.

Yesterday (8 March), we celebrated this day with our sisters from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) sharing ideas that can help us face the past and better prepare for the future.

It is apparent, that even now in 2012, after many years our countries have attained independence and democracy, African women remain significantly marginalised. We remain the majority in the unemployment lines.  We continue to bear the brunt of the worst of poverty; and our education standards are still not reflective of our majority status in many of our countries.

However, while there is still a lot of work to be done to empower women in the SADC region; the evidence that the struggles waged by our mothers have borne fruit is irrefutable.   

Women now have the right to vote across SADC. Many of our countries are encouraging the education of the girl-child; something which did not come without a struggle.

In line with this year’s theme for the International Women’s Day: connecting girls, inspiring futures; we want young girls to have the kind of influence our forebears had on us. Their selflessness inspired us to become more than what the patriarchal society wanted us to be.

Their commitment to the ideals of freedom and equality inspired us to be the examples to young girls never to accept anything less of themselves. We must encourage young girls to prioritise education in order to extricate themselves and their families out of poverty.

We must do all we can to show young girls the dangers of entering into a sexual life while still too young. We must arm them with adequate information and skills to better survive the ever-changing world we live in.

Currently, one of the major concerns that we have in South Africa is the overwhelming number of school-going girls that are pregnant.  To deal with this in Gauteng, last year we launched the teenage pregnancy awareness campaign to tackle the scourge head on. 

We have committed ourselves to give more attention to family planning and women’s reproductive rights focusing on preventing teenage pregnancy and reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. 

For me the celebrations around the International Women’s Day must be about the continued struggle for the full emancipation of women because as much as we have achieved so much, many women still live in poverty.

Many remain jobless and have little access to skills and economic activity and many are still victims of violence and abuse. 

The conflict across some SADC countries continues to eat away at the achievements we have made in the past 50-or-so years. It must be remembered that wars affect women and children the most.

In fact, as wars bring about with them chaos and lawlessness, the safety of women comes under threat – with some countries using rape and other sexual violence as weapons of war.

Also, the fact that wars mean diverting critical funds to military spending than education and other social upliftment programmes; women again become the primary losers.

I would like to call on all women to do their bit and ensure that the future for our girls is bright, equal, safe and rewarding.