Nairobi — The world has yet to recognise the role of women in development and peace building. It is high time that the society take women into account, recognise and involve them in nation-building.
Six years ago, newly-widowed Zeinabu Saleh Msomoka was desperately struggling to feed and educate her six children and the four grandchildren she took in when her eldest son and his wife died of Aids. At an age where many women look forward to a peaceful retirement, Ms Msomoka was scrambling for handouts from friends and neighbours in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and trying to stretch out the meagre food rations she received from a government pension. Even with these efforts, she was unable to afford school fees or even one meal a day for her family.
That was when she entered the world of business. Msomoka sold some of her food rations for about TSh500 (about US$1). That became her start-up capital for her first venture, selling roasted cassava and porridge to school children. The following year, one of Msomoka's neighbours told her about a micro-credit organisation called PRIDE. She got a loan of TSh 50,000 (about US$60). Now, 54- year-old Msomoka feeds her family three meals a day and pays her grandchildren's school fees. She owns five acres of land that she plans to develop into a farming scheme and has just recently taken out another loan of TSh 1 million (about $US 1,200) to expand her busy restaurant. And she hasn't missed a single re-payment.
"I can now look forward to the future, something I'd lost hope in before I joined PRIDE," Msomoka told a workshop at the National Summit on Africa, held in Washington on February 16 - 20. Msomoka is one of approximately 250,000 clients in Africa who receive access to small business loans through programs such as PRIDE.
Typically, micro-credit programs enable poor entrepreneurs on the edge of the traditional banking system to receive loans of about $50 to $200 to start up income generating projects. Most borrowers are women. Micro-credit programs have been around for less than 10 years in Africa. Yet, they have been highly effective in fighting poverty, agreed panelists at the workshop.
"Micro-finance makes a big impact in the lives of these clients and also in the lives of their dependants," said Clare Wavamunno, a policy specialist based in the Ugandan branch of the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA) Inc, headquartered in Washington.
"If you give a dollar to a client, you know that you have given a dollar to 10 people to share," she said, adding that the extended family system is central to peoples' survival in Africa. One of Wavamunno's clients, a 63-year- old widow, supports 16 orphans.
FINCA's 42,000 clients in Uganda, Tanzania, and Malawi - and a branch just opening up in South Africa - are small women entrepreneurs who have a repayment rate of 99 per cent, said Wavamunno. The average loan is $94 to $120. As of December 1999, a total of $2 million was loaned out, while the balances of savings totalled $2.2 million. Rashid Malima, general manager of PRIDE Tanzania, cautioned that micro-lending is not without its problems. He said many Africans are "extremely poor," which makes it difficult for small entrepreneurs to sell their goods and services and limits opportunities for expansion.
Aids has shrunk the workforce. Also, it is hard to reach the poorest, who often live in remote, inaccessible rural areas, he said. Yet, panelists overwhelmingly supported micro-credit. "Poverty in Africa is real, but it is also preventable if you have the right tools," said Francis Beinpuo, executive director of Freedom from Hunger-Ghana, which has a micro-lending component. Meanwhile if regional geo-politics are any indication, Rose Ilibagiza from Rwanda and Jeanine Mukanirwa Tshimpambu from the Democratic Republic of Congo should be sworn enemies who mistrust - or even hate - each other. Their governments - along with five other nations - are involved in a bitter struggle in Congo, a two-year-old conflict that US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has called "Africa's first world war."
Instead of being hardened by the politics, Ilibagiza and Mukanirwa have chosen to become allies in the struggle for peace. They locked themselves in a hotel room in here along with 14 other women from Burundi, Angola, Uganda, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to hammer out a peace statement, which they presented in a workshop at the recent National Summit on Africa, held in Washington February 16 - 20. "We are the pillar of our society; we are the pillar of our families," said Mukanirwa, who is vice-president of the Congolese non-government organisation Promotion and Support for Women's Initiatives. She said that the women - especially from Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi - came to the table as "united sisters" who "all suffer the same consequences of war."
"We feel that all women should bring in their efforts to support the peace that our leaders have signed," said Ilibagiza, who is deputy to the Minister of Social Affairs in the Rwanda government. The statement that the 16 women drafted during the summit lists a wide array of measures that national, regional, and international bodies should pursue to bring peace to the embattled Great Lakes region. Topping the list is a strong call to include women in all stages of peace building, from the prevention of armed conflict to international, regional, and sub-regional peace negotiations. Other measures include: banning the conscription of child soldiers, respecting national borders and sovereignty, increasing support for refugees and internally displaced persons, putting more resources into preventing - rather than dealing with - war and immediately deploying peacekeepers to Congo.
Ilibagiza said the women will send their statement to their countries' leaders, the Organisation for African Unity, United Nations' bodies, and other groups. The 16 women also plan to have a follow-up meeting in Rwanda in July or August. Several panelists and workshop participants noted that women are continually excluded from initiatives such as the Lusaka Peace Accord, brokered last July by Zambian President Frederick Chiluba on behalf of the Southern Africa Development Community and the Organization of African Unity.
"The Lusaka Accord is an agreement between military people, commanders of national armies," said workshop participant Algeria Aqua Agog, a member of the Akin Mama we Africa women's organisation in Uganda.
"If this accord was drafted with women on board, it would take into consideration issues that affect the larger population, like children, and how the participation of civil society is an important and integral part of peace building and the cease-fire," she said.
In late February, the United Nations Security Council is expected to vote on sending a 5,500-strong UN mission to monitor the cease-fire in Congo. US President Bill Clifton told summit participants that he supports this move. Following a February 27 congressional hearing, the US government earmarked approximately $40 million of its peacekeeping fund to support the UN's mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Agog and all the panellists urged the international community to support the Lusaka Peace Accord and African women's peace building projects. Women's efforts to bring about peace can have powerful results. Agog described how Ugandan women lobbied for "amnesty" legislation that allows fighters in Uganda's civil war to turn in their weapons as a way of ending the war.
This lobbying happened in part because women realised that "an eye for eye" approach was not the best way to bring about justice in the country, said Agog. "The one who's killed that son of yours is the son of another woman." Women's child-rearing experiences, their responsibilities for family well-being, and the fact that they deal directly with poverty, rape, Aids, and other devastation wrecked by war make women ideal peace builders, agreed panellists and participants.
"Women, before they make a decision, will think about their children: what are they going to eat?" said Christine Ng'ambi, gender and development consultant from Zambia.
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"Women look at the world through different eyes," she said.
"They'll give a human face to every problem." The Women as Partners for Peace workshop was one of more than a dozen sessions at the National Summit on Africa, a non-governmental, non-profit movement mandated to come up with a national "plan of action" to influence US foreign policy towards Africa. At the close of the summit, the 2,300 delegates approved the draft national plan of action, which contains 236 recommendations in the areas of one economic development recommendation called for the US to formulate a Marshall Plan for Africa, which includes hosting an international conference on African reconstruction and reparations, increasing aid to Africa, and building up the infrastructure.
Other recommendations in the five thematic areas include: measures to combat Africa's brain drain that occurs when African professionals immigrate to the US and other countries; requiring countries that receive military assistance from the US to incorporate human rights education as a core component of military training programmes; giving priority to programmes, projects, and institutions that help small farmers especially women and pastoralists mandating US corporations and agencies doing business in African countries to adhere to the same environmental and other standards, levels of business ethics, and regulatory policy they would have to comply with when operating in the US provided these standards do not contravene the laws of the African countries in which the corporations and agencies operate and having the US government push for the World Bank, IMF, and other international financial institutions to drop Structural Adjustment Programmes conditionalities that restrict the capital available for human resource development, maintenance and extension of infrastructure.
AFRICANEWS News & Views on Africa from Africa Koinonia Media Centre, P.O. Box 8034, Nairobi, Kenya email: amani@iol.it
