Woman power can change the world
According to a UNDP-sponsored study released last week, gender inequality is a “barrier to progress and prosperity in Arab societies as a whole.” This final Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), compiled by Arab experts and academics, is part of a four-part series that began after September 11th. This AHDR report denies that Islam is responsible ...
According to a UNDP-sponsored study released last week, gender inequality is a "barrier to progress and prosperity in Arab societies as a whole." This final Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), compiled by Arab experts and academics, is part of a four-part series that began after September 11th.
According to a UNDP-sponsored study released last week, gender inequality is a “barrier to progress and prosperity in Arab societies as a whole.” This final Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), compiled by Arab experts and academics, is part of a four-part series that began after September 11th.
This AHDR report denies that Islam is responsible for male dominance, and instead cites cultural and political factors, as well as wars, occupation and terrorism as obstacles to equality. The first AHDR, released in 2002, identified that female disempowerment was “one of three critical deficits crippling Arab nations in their quest to return to the first rank of world leaders of commerce, learning and culture.”
Four years later, turning this condition around has become a top “precondition for development.”
The news is not all grim. “Most Arab countries now have a parliament, a cabinet or a local council, where at least one woman participates effectively,” says the AHDR. Still, many of these developments are merely cosmetic, and “[i]n all cases… real decisions in the Arab world are, at all levels, in the hands of men.” There is a broad desire for gender equality in the region, as a public opinion poll commissioned by the report shows. Women’s issues are also “increasingly permeating intellectual and cultural discourse.”
Meanwhile, a UNICEF report published this week reinforces the crucial need for gender equality. According to the State of the World’s Children 2007 Report,
Eliminating gender discrimination and empowering women will have a profound and positive impact on the survival and well-being of children. Gender equality produces the “double dividend” of benefiting both women and children and is pivotal to the health and development of families, communities and nations.
In related news, violence against women is on the rise in Afghanistan and suicide rates among Afghan women continue at a disturbing rate,
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan says that Kandahar’s only hospital for women, which has 40 beds, received 29 cases of suicide in the space of two months. Twenty of those women had set themselves alight.
Kandahar has the highest rates of self-immolation, compared to the rest of the country. Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission is working with German NGO Medica Mondiale towards overcoming cultural obstacles to female empowerment. Afghanistan has also recently passed a law which banned the marriage of women under 18 years. Another is in the pipeline which would require the consent of both the man and the woman in order for a marriage to be legal. Now that would be progress.
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