|Adam and Eve and the Serpent: Breaking the Bonds to Free Africa's Women (Ghana Universities Press, 1995, 141 p.)|
The inequitable power relations between women and men have, over the years, created a kind of cage around women which restricts their mobility, their control over their own fertility, and their participation in and benefit from development. Many women have come to see this cage as their natural and proper habitat, convinced that they are less capable than men to determine their own life options. Eve has been disempowered by the serpent of discrimination, and made unable to break the bonds of her oppression.
Yesterday we looked behind the abstraction of demographic and population statistics to see the reality of women's child-bearing role. It is one of the peculiar contradictions of women's lives that this same role for which they are most praised and valued in many societies is also the source of their subordination and invisibility. Motherhood confers social status and respectability on women in many societies, and is exalted by most religions. At the same time, motherhood has resulted in women's confinement to family and household activities which are not recognized or valued as work. Women receive little support from society as a whole in their role as mothers.
Women are trapped in a vicious cycle whereby their lower status means they have less opportunity for education and employment, and their lack of education and income security reinforces their dependence on men and their lower status. Compounding this is their disproportionately poor access to positions of power in politics or business, through which they could try to improve their status in all spheres of life. Men who are in positions of power may be reluctant to rigorously implement laws regarding women's equality which their countries may have signed (sometimes only to satisfy UN or international pressure). At a basic level many of these men do not believe that women are equal: they have not seen it in practice because women have not been granted the opportunity to show them.
It is this combination of factors which makes Africa's Eve so powerless to change her disadvantaged position. Let us today explore the absence of gender equity and equality in the fields of education, employment and political decision-making in order to understand better the causes of women's continued subordination.
Education is so important to human development and the quality of life that it has come to be considered a basic human right. Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states unequivocally that "Everyone has the right to an education." Yet in 1990, International Literacy Year, 26 per cent of the world's adult population was estimated to be illiterate. For adult women this figure rose to 33 per cent. This means that one in three adult women are illiterate, while the corresponding estimate for men is one in five.1
According to the UNDP, the gap between developing and industrialized countries on human development issues, including education, has been narrowing over the past three decades. The literacy gap between North and South narrowed from 54 percentage points in 1970 to 34 points by 1987. School enrolment rates in the South now average 70 per cent of rates in the North. However, despite this progress, there is considerable diversity within the nations of the South: poverty and deprivation have become more concentrated in Africa than any other region, particularly during the 1980s.2
High population growth rates in many African countries make the provision of universal primary education increasingly difficult. The percentage of the population under 15 years of age has decreased since 1970 in all regions of the world except Sub-Saharan Africa, where it has increased slightly and is projected to remain around 46 per cent of the total population throughout this decade. In pure numerical terms, this is an increase from roughly 122 million children in 1970 to 231 million in 1990, and projected to 317 million in the year 2000. The increased number o