The South African Commission for Gender Equality Addressing Challenges of Rural Women
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Date
2022-03-31
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Pathways to African Feminism and Development Women’s Economic Empowerment
Abstract
Over the years, empowerment of women has increasingly attracted huge
attention in the scholarly world. Most of the scholarly works on
empowerment seem to focus on pro-women policies, which appear
attractive only on paper without critically paying attention to how those
policies translate into reality. In South Africa, rural women continue to
suffer despite the nation having one of the best constitutions globally. The
South African Commission for Gender Equality (CGE), among other roles,
is man dated to advance the concerns for the rural women. The main aim of
this study is to investigate setbacks but also opportunities that the CGE
encounters in fulfilling its mandate of addressing strategic gender interests
of rural women. The paper also interrogates the social cultural challenges
that those women face in accessing their rights through the CGE. The main
geographical scope for this study is KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape
provinces because they are the areas populated with the Zulu and Xhosa
communities who are the main targets of social cultural complexities
highlighted in this paper. The study arrives at its findings through a
qualitative study where data was analysed and corroborated with CGE
operational documents, provisions in the Constitution, policy documents,
monetary and evaluation reports, minutes of proceedings and paper
publications. The study argues that the CGE cannot effectively empower
rural women when the link with other statutory bodies and Civil Society
Organizations nationally is weak. Also, the study argues that for CGE to
effectively empower rural women, it must directly relate with local rural
African Women
Studies Centre
72
1.0 Introduction
Due to a concentrated focus on eliminating racial segregation, before 1994 South
Africa paid minimal attention to the gender equality agenda. The concerns about
gender equality emerged only after a series of engagements by South African
women who indefatigably pushed for gender equality to be listed among the
significant agendas for the nation. Thus, buoyed by a ray of hope after Rolihlahla
Mandela’s ascendancy into power in 1994, South African women formulated a
Charter that exhorted the nation to put the welfare of women to the fore. The
document was presented to Mandela who made sure that gender concerns became
a central subject in the negotiation process prior to the writing up of the
Constitution. In order to ensure that women issues were not overlooked, the
negotiators settled on avoiding a structure where there is a specific
ministry/department of women. Thus, a NGM (National Gender Machinery) was
instituted. The Machinery consisted of the civil society organizations, the
executive, the legislature, and self-governing bodies (Rai, 2018; African
Development Bank, 2009). The establishment of the NGM was for the
advancement of the status of women. A number of international women’s
conferences such as the 1975 Mexico Convention, the Beijing Conference, the
CEDAW had called for the national states to put gender concerns at the centre of
the policy-making process. The necessity for a NGM was accentuated first during
the Conference in Mexico City in 1975 (Rai, 2018).
The South African women constitute the highest share of underprivileged
population in the country. This population is still affected by apartheid legacies
(racism, sexism, authoritarianism, male chauvinism).The Commission on Gender
Equality (CGE) aims at fixing those ‘ghosts of the past’ (as Ramphele, 2008 calls
them) which are enmeshed in policies that engender marginalization of women.
In spite of South Africa ratifying international protocols, I argue that the gender
policy agenda is still far elusive as those neo-apartheid elements are still
prevalent. Thus, this paper seeks to address these principal theoretical questions:
women and consult them from the grassroots and not solely rely on “elitist
women” who risk misrepresenting or even ‘under-representing’ women
interests.
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Keywords
Commission for Gender Equality, Constitution, South Africa, Women, Women Interests