By Ragan M. Conteh
The speaker of Parliament has stated that ending discrimination against women and dramatically increasing their number in the House, in the executive branch and other leadership positions could unleash a more inclusive recovery for all people, not just for ensuring that the particular needs, interests and experiences of women are captured in the decision-making process.
Speaker Bundu went on that efforts aimed at ending discrimination against women have been around for the longest time and have continued to gain renewed currency and vigour every season.
He said today, as they meet in Accra in the shadows of the world’s celebration of another anniversary of the International Women’s Day, they are enjoined as leaders of parliaments in Commonwealth Africa to take a pause and carry out some introspection and stocktaking to see what has been achieved in the realm of empowering their women and what still remains to be done.
‘Unless we do this now the glass ceiling over this issue will continue to remain strong and seemingly unbreakable. I made a similar call to the Inter-Parliamentary Union when we met just a few weeks ago at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. In the international arena there is already a plethora of impressive international instruments,’ he recalled.
He said they range from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) adopted in 1979, which is more or less an embodiment of an International Bill of Rights for Women; to the decision of the Commonwealth ministers responsible for Women’s Affairs in 1996; to the Beijing Declaration; the UN Security Council Resolution 1325; to the establishment of the UN Women and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
He stated that despite the gradual and incremental nature of the process, all of these international instruments individually and collectively speak eloquently on the empowerment of women, ‘and altogether they prescribe a threshold of 30 per cent in that regard’.
Truly and verifiably, he said there has been some significant progress towards meeting this target in some countries.
He stated that, for example, of the top ten countries in the world with the highest representation of women in Parliament, only three are from the Commonwealth: Rwanda with 56 per cent, South Africa with 44 per cent and Mozambique with 39 per cent.
The speaker said while these achievements give cause for a modicum of celebration, they do also point conspicuously to the fact that there is still a great deal of work to be done.
Of course, Dr Bundu said, ‘The executive branch will tell you they have done their bit by negotiating and signing up to these instruments and our Parliaments, in turn, can reasonably argue that they have stepped up and done the necessary ratification to bring them into the mainstream of domestic legislation.’
The speaker added, ‘That is not all, there is also the obligation to deliberately and determinedly create the environment necessary to enable women to take their rightful place in the decision-making portals of society.’
He said if the future development of countries is to be sustainable, it is fundamental that the status of women should first be enhanced through education and education of the men to accept that women are equal partners for development; education of the women to accept that they have a special role to play alongside the men; and education of the children to ensure that their future is assured and sustainable.
He said most countries, including Sierra Leone, are already actively engaged in this process and its progressive annual budgetary allocation is in full resonance with the sacred duty to ensure that there are equal rights and adequate educational opportunities for all citizens at all levels but particularly so for the women and the girl child.
Speaker Bundu revealed that this must be kept alive and reinvigorated year in year out until gender equality is attained.
‘Putting women and children at the centre of our development agenda will fundamentally drive better and more sustainable development outcomes for all, support a more rapid recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and place us back on a footing to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,’ he said.
The speaker went further that this is the new journey they must all embark upon, adding that it may appear to be tough and arduous but undertake they must and like every journey they must begin with a single step. He asserted that the goal might look impossible, adding that even their friends ‘might tell us we can’t do it but should ignore them’.
‘We are not stronger than the people who tell us we can’t do it but the difference is that we must believe in ourselves and in our capacity to change things for the better for ourselves and for our future generations,’ he said.