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Tuesday, June 06, 2000
By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau
UNITED NATIONS -- First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton provided star power at the opening day of a United Nations conference on the status of women, but it was a woman from Africa who had delegates shouting in approval when she admonished them for too much talk.
"I almost didn't come," Ugandan Vice President Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe told the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on Gender Equality yesterday. "We are doing a lot of talking. We can come here and make big speeches, but in 25 years we'll come back, and things we'll be saying will be just the same. In Africa, which I know very well, the political commitment [for equality] is not there."
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The U.N. meeting comes five years after the biggest global gathering of women in history adopted an ambitious platform to achieve women's equality. It was called to review progress since the Beijing conference.
Clinton, who also took part in the Beijing meeting, talked about the need for so-called micro credit, or small loans, to enable women around the world to buy cows, sheep, sewing machines or whatever else they need to earn a living. There are now 1,065 micro credit lending institutions that have loans out to 13.8 million families. She noted that women's repayment rates for micro loans so far has been high. But while applauding this success, she repeated a call she had made in Beijing for 100 million such loans to be extended by 2010.
"Women's rights are central to all of our efforts toward peace," said Clinton, who is the Democratic nominee seeking a U.S. Senate seat from New York. "We have seen progress being made ... but our work is not done."
But it was Kazibwe who said what was on the minds of a lot of the 3,000 delegates and 7,000 representatives of non-governmental organizations in attendance.
The United Nations Development Fund for Women yesterday released a new report on the progress women have made toward equality in the last 15 years. It found that only 11 percent of countries have achieved gender equality in high schools, while 30 countries had less equality in educating girls and boys than they did in the mid-1980s.
On the other hand, the share of women in paid employment in industry and services (not farming) ranged from a high of 54 percent in Ukraine and Latvia to a low of 5 percent in Chad. The United States is at 48 percent. The U.N. goal is 50 percent.
The United States ranks near the bottom in women's share of national legislative seats. The Beijing women's conference in 1995 set a goal of 30 percent, but in the United States, it's only 13 percent. Yet only eight countries have achieved 30 percent or more: Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa and Sweden.
The report says the four countries that have made the most progress toward reaching gender equality are Denmark,, Finland, Norway and Sweden, with Germany, Iceland, Netherlands and South Africa close behind.
As women in bright red, orange and green African robes and turbans mingled with Middle Eastern women covered from head to toe and Western women in trousers, Clinton said that despite the different clothing, religions and languages of participants, such conferences are transforming and among "the most moving and meaningful experiences of my life."
Still, there were moments when sisterhood was not uppermost on the minds of those who flocked to the United Nations this week. Because of computer malfunctions and short staffing, lines for credentials granting access to the sessions sometimes persisted for as long as four hours.
After standing outside a trailer for an hour, Gunor Ngambe of Sweden said 37 of her countrymen had already waited four hours. "You'd think they'd have more people," she said glaring at an American. "If the United States would pay its back dues, they could hire more people, and this wouldn't be such a nightmare."
At that point, a distraught woman who had been waiting in the wrong line screamed at a U.N. staffer: "I curse you. May it take you 100 more years for equality."
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said this week's conference should "put the world on notice that not only do women belong on this planet, but that the future of this planet depends on women."
He said it was troubling that three-fourths of the world's poorest people are women, and that two-thirds of the 110 million children not in school are female. But the U.N. leader said he was confident that the delegates, working behind closed doors, would produce a final document at week's end to address such concerns.
For the first time, Annan spoke to several thousand women representing non-governmental organizations, which the women called a "breakthrough."
Nevertheless, by week's end the goals first set out at the Beijing conference calling for less violence against women, better health care, equal access to education, more media access, more respect for young girls, less poverty among women, more power and decision-making authority for women and more institutional mechanisms for women's rights could have more so-called "brackets" around them. Brackets mean there is no agreement among delegates.
The Vatican and various Islamic governments disagree with the conference's emphasis on reproductive rights and changes in the traditional roles for women and don't want school children given sex education.
Much of the conference is a pep rally for more autonomy for women and for more access to such medical procedures as abortion. A number of speakers worried aloud yesterday that the New York conference, which runs through Friday and is designed to review progress for women since the Beijing conference five years ago, could end up weakening the goals adopted there.
She said assistance to Africa now comes in the form of help building latrines and teaching women how to bathe their babies. Those need to be changed. "We need infrastructure, electricity and telecommunications," she said. 