Date: 05/08/2005
Source: Ministry of Health
Title: Madlala-Routledge: University of KwaZulu-Natal Alumnus Lunch
Deputy Minister of Health, Mrs Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Alumnus Lunch Celebration
WOMEN IN GOVERNMENT, LEADERSHIP AND HEALTH: GAINS AND CHALLENGES
Introduction
On 9 August 1956, when approximately 20 000 South African women protested against the pass laws, they were establishing the foundations of what we build on today. One of these foundations is the recognition of women's status as full citizens in society. By marching on the Union Buildings, women marched on the stronghold of power in apartheid South Africa. They also defied the social forces that defined them as non-citizens. In so doing, they physically asserted their right to belong and participate within the nation.
Today, in commemorating women in August, we can celebrate our country's enormous achievements in advancing women's rights. But the recent review process associated with Beijing Plus 10 should also make us reflect critically on what women's active public participation really means beyond formal provisions for equality and justice.
In this speech, I want to talk both about the gains we have made, and about some of the challenges we now face. I dedicate this speech to Victoria Mxenge. She was a very special person, who chose to stand up and gave her life for our freedom. Victoria Mxenge was brutally murdered twenty years ago on 1 August 1985. Although she was more widely known as a human rights lawyer, she began her professional life as a nurse.
In her life, Victoria Mxenge realised that issues of health could not be addressed separately from issues of human rights. In honouring her memory I call on all South Africans to take forward the struggle for which she gave her life, the struggle for human rights and a better life for all. This university could assist us to keep her memory alive by documenting her life, as part of our national heritage.
Our legacy of gender transformation
South Africa is exceptional among African countries in having a history of struggles for women's rights that has been part of the struggle against racial oppression. The first South African Women's Charter was drawn up in 1954. And in the same decade, the Federation of South African Women drew together progressive women from different races, classes and organisations and ensured that women were recognised as political agents in the public sphere.
Later, during the eighties, many women not only resisted apartheid within male-centred organisations. They also developed organisations and discourses that fore-grounded women's rights in the struggle for South African democracy and maintained that women’s issues were national issues.
By the time of the release of political prisoners from the early nineties, the ground had been laid for addressing women's rights within emerging debates about human rights and democracy.
From 1992, the Women's National Coalition monitored gender equality in the constitutional dispensation being negotiated by different parties and organisations at the time. And the outcome was the drawing up of a second Women's Charter, which outlined priorities for driving gender transformation forward.
Shireen Hassim aptly uses the phrase "gender pact" (1) to describe the integration of women's rights at the time. The term powerfully captures the firm commitment to gender transformation in relation to democratic transition.
The provisions for gender equality in the South African Constitution therefore grew out of a long history of progressively integrating gender transformation into our democratising society. We have steadily consolidated our gains. We have also worked to mainstream gender into development and democratic change. This has meant analysing the effects of various programmes, practices and policies for men and women, and making interventions to correct imbalances.
Our mainstreaming process has been driven largely by the National Gender Machinery, as a cluster of structures that ensure equality for women in all spheres of life. The National Gender Machinery is made up of the Commission for Gender Equality, the Office on the Status of Women, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Improvement of the Quality of Life and Status of Women and the Parliamentary Women’s Caucus. This machinery is a result of the women’s movement and is effective only if held up by a strong women’s movement, with which it must interact.
The process of mainstreaming was taken further in 2001, with the adoption of South Africa's National Policy Framework for Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality. This policy framework provides decision-makers in all spheres with a set of principles, strategic guidelines and an institutional framework for ensuring women's rights (2001: 2).
We have also turned to international mechanisms to advance women's rights. In 1993, South Africa signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and ratified it in 1996. Our national machinery is based on recommendations from the Beijing Platform of Action, where governments were called on to provide resources for and to authorise national machinery to influence policy, and to formulate and review legislation for gender transformation. South Africa is a signatory of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Declaration on Gender, and ratified the Protocol on Women's Rights in Africa in 2004. South African legislation has also drawn directly on women's rights models used internationally. For example, with the drafting of the Domestic Violence Act, the South African Law Commission used a framework provided by a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) project.
During the last decade, therefore, the South African government has built on a national history of struggle for women's rights and drawn on different international mechanisms. Among many things, this has meant that it is no longer deemed a pardonable and private domestic matter when a woman is raped by her partner. The Domestic Violence Act of 1998 ensures that women can take action against perpetrators.
No longer is discrimination in the workplace an issue that women must quietly submit to. Our Employment Equity Act of 1998 ensures that women do not have to tolerate such injustices. No longer can institutions and employers act as though women were naturally unsuited to public life. We have affirmative action measures that encourage women to take up leading positions in health, education, commerce and government.
While we still face many barriers, more and more women are entering traditionally male spheres such as government, medicine, engineering and science, because all of South Africa's women now have formal access to centres of training and education. But it is now 10 years since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. It is therefore a timely moment for us to think pro-actively about extending the frontiers of our democracy with regard to women's rights.
This is imperative when we consider that many South African women continue to face serious disadvantages. Today, there are many women in informal settlements, peri-urban and rural areas who confront layers of oppression. In addition to structural factors that restrict their access to economic resources, education, employment and public participation, they regularly deal with violence and illnesses such as HIV and AIDS.
I want to go on to deal with two sets of challenges that this poses for us. The first concerns how we think about women's roles in leadership and public participation. The second challenge (and this I want to pose directly to an academic audience) concerns the role of writing and research in taking the struggle for women's security and rights further.
Women in government and leadership
Our National Policy Framework for Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality clearly recognises the role that government structures have to play in driving gender transformation. Yet it also states that: "It is the experience of many countries that national machineries cannot shift public policy agendas for women without the participation of organisations of civil society" (2).
For decades, South African women have been active in organisations that struggled for democratic decision-making and participation. From the fifties, this was illustrated when the Federation of South African Women created a national organisation for women to play active roles in fighting for justice and equality. In later years, women continued to champion social transformation.
As leaders, activists and organisers, women in communities resisted high rentals, unjust service charges and inflated food prices and foreign companies that supported the apartheid government. They worked to defend their families and communities. They supported their children in struggles against repression. They formed support groups to defend threatened communities.
In many cases, women did the political groundwork. They were highly active in mobilising, awareness-raising and organising. Often, with very little formal education or experience, many women developed important skills.
They were students of economics and politics, and learned first-hand what it meant to work with and for communities. They provided support in the form of invisible labour to ensure that the poor and sick members of their communities were fed and looked after.
Today, many women's organisations in communities continue to work as unrecognised leaders, organisers and caregivers. They are setting up shelters for battered women, organising feeding scheme programmes, providing support to assist those with HIV and AIDS. They are talking and working with municipality councillors and officials and seizing the existing opportunities for decision-making that our structures provide.
On a daily basis, women also strategise about how to manage resources. When there is no running water, it is women who fetch it. When members of the community are sick or dying, it is women who care for them. When there is a need to manage limited services, it is women who devise ways of doing this effectively.
In thinking about women in governance and leadership, therefore, we must fully acknowledge the pivotal contributions of the often-unrecognised leadership of many women's groups and individual women in civil society.
What are the spaces and opportunities for decision-making available to many women in our country? How can these spaces be developed to encourage them to speak in their own voices to and about the people and worlds they know best?
Here we must remember that histories of gender, racial and class oppression still disadvantage the majority of black women in decision-making and public participation. There are still firm beliefs that only men's contributions and masculine values and attitudes are valuable in public life. This naturalised prejudice explains why gender oppression continues despite the growth of progressive legislation and policy-making for women.
In present-day South Africa, much emphasis is placed on the role of women in government and state structures to drive women's rights. Yet how do we integrate women's voices and lived experiences in legislation and policymaking? And how can we maintain an organic link between women's voices, organisations in civil society, and government?
During and immediately after the Beijing Conference of 1995, civil society organisations featured prominently in advocacy on gender equality and women’s empowerment. In fact, the Beijing Declaration stated "women's groups and networks and other non-governmental organizations and community-based organisations, with full respect for their autonomy, are important to the effective implementation and follow-up of the Platform for Action" (3).
As we follow up ten years later, we are tasked to consider how to strengthen government's co-operation with women's groups and community organisations. We should think about what partnerships can be made with civil society organisations. The active participation of women's organisations is in fact crucial in ensuring that women's perspectives inform all our programmes, policies and planning.
We should also consider how education, information and training could enhance the leadership roles that many women are already playing in civil society. By addressing such challenges, we can build an environment in which public participation will meaningfully shape policies and programmes.
In recent years, efforts to address women's empowerment in local government are important steps in the direction of building collective accountability. Local government can bring government closest to many women. It is the level of government that deals directly with issues such as health clinics, housing, electricity, water and the other resources and services that women regularly use. It can also offer women unique opportunities to make their voices heard. It is for this reason, that the decision by the African National Congress (ANC) for a 50% quota for women on the party’s list for local government is so crucial. This is a victory for access which women have fought for. However, it is even more important that this goes beyond representation and access. For real emancipation to take place, we must continue to insist on the need for a change in the culture of the institutions and spaces that women occupy, in order to ensure that their presence makes a real difference in women’s lives.
This has been recognised by the recently drawn up Local Government Gender Policy Framework (4). And lately, some municipalities have begun to address the need to empower women through gender policies. The Women’s Budget is another initiative of civil society that has been applied to the national budget. The Women’s Budget is not a separate budget for women, but a tool for analysing budgets from a gender perspective. Using it, it is possible to see how much is being budgeted and spent on women, or on services which are important for women, such as water, health and electricity. The Women’s Budget Initiative is an area which universities can research and support at local government level.
Compared with many countries, South Africa has an extremely impressive number of women in government. But it is also important that we work consistently to involve all women in decision-making about our policies, our programmes and our ongoing development. Let us listen to our leaders who are women in farms, in communities, and in informal settlements. We have much to learn.
Gender Research and Health
Let me turn now to a second, but related set of challenges. I want to do this by looking at two of the main health and security burdens that women confront today: HIV and AIDS and gender-based violence. To develop effective programmes and policies around both of these areas, it is crucial to marshal the full range of knowledge and information for developing sustainable, effective and pro-active responses.
I have spoken of the need to create partnerships between civil society and government. What I am pointing to here is the urgency, especially in the face of current health and security priorities, of integrating gender research into holistic and sustainable responses to women's health needs.
As we seek to understand the totality of the disease burden in South Africa, the universities and other institutions have a crucial role to play in providing research, training and knowledge. They should help us understand the impact of disease and poverty on women. Such work would not only be medical research, information gathering and monitoring. It would also include social science and interdisciplinary research with the potential to influence public debate and raise awareness in civil society.
The value of this work is illustrated in research that has been done on masculinities. From the mid-1990s, more and more emphasis has been placed on how men learn violent attitudes and behaviour, on how norms of aggression and violence become embedded in societies. Emerging research is therefore raising awareness of how to challenge systemic violence in our country.
Analysis, theorising and case studies of masculinities have been rapidly increasing in books, journals, conferences, university courses and postgraduate research. It would be a tragic waste of socially valuable research if such knowledge remained confined to the academic sphere, if it were treated solely as the subject of intellectual discussion. Or if it were only the means by which postgraduates and researchers demonstrated their research skills and theoretical acumen.
We can learn so much from it about how social circumstances and histories shape individual and group behaviour. We can learn to understand different histories and contexts of gendered behaviour. And in learning, we can be empowered to develop strategic interventions and long-term solutions.
Violence against women and children, and especially domestic violence, can be so hideous that we feel powerless to change it. We can easily be overwhelmed by its enormity, and take actions that do not address the root of the problem, or that only reflect our horror and outrage.
So the challenge is how to take the important research work and knowledge further. We could consider how this work can be disseminated among wider audiences. We can think about building partnerships between centres of research, groups of researchers and even individual researchers, and policy-makers or civil society organisations. There is no doubt that connections have already been made. But in the face of the enormous battle that faces us, we are challenged to consider strengthening collaboration.
A similar situation applies to work on HIV and AIDS. Both nationally and internationally, much research on HIV and AIDS highlights women's special vulnerability to HIV infection. It also emphasises women's added burdens in providing support and care for those who are ill, even when they themselves are in need of care. The government's HIV, AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections Strategic Plan for 2000–2005 raised the need for multi-sectoral collaboration. There has been a clear recognition that HIV affects every sector of our society. Because of this, we need to draw on a vast range of national energies and resources.
Research is defined as a priority area in the plan. And it is important that the plan makes explicit provision for identifying areas of research in addition to medical research and monitoring. Such interdisciplinary additional research can take us far in dealing with the connections between HIV transmission and social relationships and identities. It can contribute enormously to raising public awareness, as well as to programmes and policies.
It is heartening to see the recent growth of research on HIV and AIDS in relation gender dynamics such as gender-based violence. It is also very encouraging to see that much research uses a human rights framework that integrates women's rights with health care and socio-economic rights.
Generally, current research raises the imperative of looking at links between power, gender, sexuality and sexual behaviour in order to shape the insight for guiding effective programmes and policy development. According to such research, health care is not a stand-alone sect oral issue requiring a one-dimensional medical response.
It requires an integrated response that is attentive to social contexts, access to resources, and the power relations that confront people. And these factors are crucial in addressing the health needs of the many women in this country. The social value of recent work on gender and health is reminiscent of the role of writing on women's health in the seventies and early 80s. During this time, publications such as the Rape Crisis newsletter, Speak and Agenda produced information and analysis dealing with women's health in relation to social conditions and relationships.
Women's health studies at universities including the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Cape Town and the University of Natal were also important sites for developing this knowledge. Today, there is not only a definite need for this work, but also far greater scope for collaboration, partnerships and support for it.
South Africa faces distinct struggles around strengthening its democracy, around poverty and diseases such as AIDS, around eradicating mindsets and behaviour that continue to harm women. Research on masculinities and HIV has made crucial breakthroughs by developing knowledge with urgent social and policy-making relevance. South Africa has a vibrant political tradition of writing on gender and health. We can build on this.
Conclusion
Through partnerships and collaboration, we can mobilise the collective skills and energies within civil societies and government. We can also harness the resources and skills of sites of research and teaching in taking social transformation forward. Our democracy is built on a proud legacy of alliances, collaboration and mobilisation among different sectors: among those in communities, workers, student activists, progressive researchers, teachers and academics.
The tradition of consolidating diverse energies to build democracy is not new to us. Let us recall this proud tradition, and let us mobilise our national resources so that we can speak even more confidently about our national commitment to building democracy.
I thank you.
Issued by: Ministry of Health
5 August 2005
Source: Ministry of Health
Title: Madlala-Routledge: University of KwaZulu-Natal Alumnus Lunch
Deputy Minister of Health, Mrs Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Alumnus Lunch Celebration
WOMEN IN GOVERNMENT, LEADERSHIP AND HEALTH: GAINS AND CHALLENGES
Introduction
On 9 August 1956, when approximately 20 000 South African women protested against the pass laws, they were establishing the foundations of what we build on today. One of these foundations is the recognition of women's status as full citizens in society. By marching on the Union Buildings, women marched on the stronghold of power in apartheid South Africa. They also defied the social forces that defined them as non-citizens. In so doing, they physically asserted their right to belong and participate within the nation.
Today, in commemorating women in August, we can celebrate our country's enormous achievements in advancing women's rights. But the recent review process associated with Beijing Plus 10 should also make us reflect critically on what women's active public participation really means beyond formal provisions for equality and justice.
In this speech, I want to talk both about the gains we have made, and about some of the challenges we now face. I dedicate this speech to Victoria Mxenge. She was a very special person, who chose to stand up and gave her life for our freedom. Victoria Mxenge was brutally murdered twenty years ago on 1 August 1985. Although she was more widely known as a human rights lawyer, she began her professional life as a nurse.
In her life, Victoria Mxenge realised that issues of health could not be addressed separately from issues of human rights. In honouring her memory I call on all South Africans to take forward the struggle for which she gave her life, the struggle for human rights and a better life for all. This university could assist us to keep her memory alive by documenting her life, as part of our national heritage.
Our legacy of gender transformation
South Africa is exceptional among African countries in having a history of struggles for women's rights that has been part of the struggle against racial oppression. The first South African Women's Charter was drawn up in 1954. And in the same decade, the Federation of South African Women drew together progressive women from different races, classes and organisations and ensured that women were recognised as political agents in the public sphere.
Later, during the eighties, many women not only resisted apartheid within male-centred organisations. They also developed organisations and discourses that fore-grounded women's rights in the struggle for South African democracy and maintained that women’s issues were national issues.
By the time of the release of political prisoners from the early nineties, the ground had been laid for addressing women's rights within emerging debates about human rights and democracy.
From 1992, the Women's National Coalition monitored gender equality in the constitutional dispensation being negotiated by different parties and organisations at the time. And the outcome was the drawing up of a second Women's Charter, which outlined priorities for driving gender transformation forward.
Shireen Hassim aptly uses the phrase "gender pact" (1) to describe the integration of women's rights at the time. The term powerfully captures the firm commitment to gender transformation in relation to democratic transition.
The provisions for gender equality in the South African Constitution therefore grew out of a long history of progressively integrating gender transformation into our democratising society. We have steadily consolidated our gains. We have also worked to mainstream gender into development and democratic change. This has meant analysing the effects of various programmes, practices and policies for men and women, and making interventions to correct imbalances.
Our mainstreaming process has been driven largely by the National Gender Machinery, as a cluster of structures that ensure equality for women in all spheres of life. The National Gender Machinery is made up of the Commission for Gender Equality, the Office on the Status of Women, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Improvement of the Quality of Life and Status of Women and the Parliamentary Women’s Caucus. This machinery is a result of the women’s movement and is effective only if held up by a strong women’s movement, with which it must interact.
The process of mainstreaming was taken further in 2001, with the adoption of South Africa's National Policy Framework for Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality. This policy framework provides decision-makers in all spheres with a set of principles, strategic guidelines and an institutional framework for ensuring women's rights (2001: 2).
We have also turned to international mechanisms to advance women's rights. In 1993, South Africa signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and ratified it in 1996. Our national machinery is based on recommendations from the Beijing Platform of Action, where governments were called on to provide resources for and to authorise national machinery to influence policy, and to formulate and review legislation for gender transformation. South Africa is a signatory of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Declaration on Gender, and ratified the Protocol on Women's Rights in Africa in 2004. South African legislation has also drawn directly on women's rights models used internationally. For example, with the drafting of the Domestic Violence Act, the South African Law Commission used a framework provided by a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) project.
During the last decade, therefore, the South African government has built on a national history of struggle for women's rights and drawn on different international mechanisms. Among many things, this has meant that it is no longer deemed a pardonable and private domestic matter when a woman is raped by her partner. The Domestic Violence Act of 1998 ensures that women can take action against perpetrators.
No longer is discrimination in the workplace an issue that women must quietly submit to. Our Employment Equity Act of 1998 ensures that women do not have to tolerate such injustices. No longer can institutions and employers act as though women were naturally unsuited to public life. We have affirmative action measures that encourage women to take up leading positions in health, education, commerce and government.
While we still face many barriers, more and more women are entering traditionally male spheres such as government, medicine, engineering and science, because all of South Africa's women now have formal access to centres of training and education. But it is now 10 years since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. It is therefore a timely moment for us to think pro-actively about extending the frontiers of our democracy with regard to women's rights.
This is imperative when we consider that many South African women continue to face serious disadvantages. Today, there are many women in informal settlements, peri-urban and rural areas who confront layers of oppression. In addition to structural factors that restrict their access to economic resources, education, employment and public participation, they regularly deal with violence and illnesses such as HIV and AIDS.
I want to go on to deal with two sets of challenges that this poses for us. The first concerns how we think about women's roles in leadership and public participation. The second challenge (and this I want to pose directly to an academic audience) concerns the role of writing and research in taking the struggle for women's security and rights further.
Women in government and leadership
Our National Policy Framework for Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality clearly recognises the role that government structures have to play in driving gender transformation. Yet it also states that: "It is the experience of many countries that national machineries cannot shift public policy agendas for women without the participation of organisations of civil society" (2).
For decades, South African women have been active in organisations that struggled for democratic decision-making and participation. From the fifties, this was illustrated when the Federation of South African Women created a national organisation for women to play active roles in fighting for justice and equality. In later years, women continued to champion social transformation.
As leaders, activists and organisers, women in communities resisted high rentals, unjust service charges and inflated food prices and foreign companies that supported the apartheid government. They worked to defend their families and communities. They supported their children in struggles against repression. They formed support groups to defend threatened communities.
In many cases, women did the political groundwork. They were highly active in mobilising, awareness-raising and organising. Often, with very little formal education or experience, many women developed important skills.
They were students of economics and politics, and learned first-hand what it meant to work with and for communities. They provided support in the form of invisible labour to ensure that the poor and sick members of their communities were fed and looked after.
Today, many women's organisations in communities continue to work as unrecognised leaders, organisers and caregivers. They are setting up shelters for battered women, organising feeding scheme programmes, providing support to assist those with HIV and AIDS. They are talking and working with municipality councillors and officials and seizing the existing opportunities for decision-making that our structures provide.
On a daily basis, women also strategise about how to manage resources. When there is no running water, it is women who fetch it. When members of the community are sick or dying, it is women who care for them. When there is a need to manage limited services, it is women who devise ways of doing this effectively.
In thinking about women in governance and leadership, therefore, we must fully acknowledge the pivotal contributions of the often-unrecognised leadership of many women's groups and individual women in civil society.
What are the spaces and opportunities for decision-making available to many women in our country? How can these spaces be developed to encourage them to speak in their own voices to and about the people and worlds they know best?
Here we must remember that histories of gender, racial and class oppression still disadvantage the majority of black women in decision-making and public participation. There are still firm beliefs that only men's contributions and masculine values and attitudes are valuable in public life. This naturalised prejudice explains why gender oppression continues despite the growth of progressive legislation and policy-making for women.
In present-day South Africa, much emphasis is placed on the role of women in government and state structures to drive women's rights. Yet how do we integrate women's voices and lived experiences in legislation and policymaking? And how can we maintain an organic link between women's voices, organisations in civil society, and government?
During and immediately after the Beijing Conference of 1995, civil society organisations featured prominently in advocacy on gender equality and women’s empowerment. In fact, the Beijing Declaration stated "women's groups and networks and other non-governmental organizations and community-based organisations, with full respect for their autonomy, are important to the effective implementation and follow-up of the Platform for Action" (3).
As we follow up ten years later, we are tasked to consider how to strengthen government's co-operation with women's groups and community organisations. We should think about what partnerships can be made with civil society organisations. The active participation of women's organisations is in fact crucial in ensuring that women's perspectives inform all our programmes, policies and planning.
We should also consider how education, information and training could enhance the leadership roles that many women are already playing in civil society. By addressing such challenges, we can build an environment in which public participation will meaningfully shape policies and programmes.
In recent years, efforts to address women's empowerment in local government are important steps in the direction of building collective accountability. Local government can bring government closest to many women. It is the level of government that deals directly with issues such as health clinics, housing, electricity, water and the other resources and services that women regularly use. It can also offer women unique opportunities to make their voices heard. It is for this reason, that the decision by the African National Congress (ANC) for a 50% quota for women on the party’s list for local government is so crucial. This is a victory for access which women have fought for. However, it is even more important that this goes beyond representation and access. For real emancipation to take place, we must continue to insist on the need for a change in the culture of the institutions and spaces that women occupy, in order to ensure that their presence makes a real difference in women’s lives.
This has been recognised by the recently drawn up Local Government Gender Policy Framework (4). And lately, some municipalities have begun to address the need to empower women through gender policies. The Women’s Budget is another initiative of civil society that has been applied to the national budget. The Women’s Budget is not a separate budget for women, but a tool for analysing budgets from a gender perspective. Using it, it is possible to see how much is being budgeted and spent on women, or on services which are important for women, such as water, health and electricity. The Women’s Budget Initiative is an area which universities can research and support at local government level.
Compared with many countries, South Africa has an extremely impressive number of women in government. But it is also important that we work consistently to involve all women in decision-making about our policies, our programmes and our ongoing development. Let us listen to our leaders who are women in farms, in communities, and in informal settlements. We have much to learn.
Gender Research and Health
Let me turn now to a second, but related set of challenges. I want to do this by looking at two of the main health and security burdens that women confront today: HIV and AIDS and gender-based violence. To develop effective programmes and policies around both of these areas, it is crucial to marshal the full range of knowledge and information for developing sustainable, effective and pro-active responses.
I have spoken of the need to create partnerships between civil society and government. What I am pointing to here is the urgency, especially in the face of current health and security priorities, of integrating gender research into holistic and sustainable responses to women's health needs.
As we seek to understand the totality of the disease burden in South Africa, the universities and other institutions have a crucial role to play in providing research, training and knowledge. They should help us understand the impact of disease and poverty on women. Such work would not only be medical research, information gathering and monitoring. It would also include social science and interdisciplinary research with the potential to influence public debate and raise awareness in civil society.
The value of this work is illustrated in research that has been done on masculinities. From the mid-1990s, more and more emphasis has been placed on how men learn violent attitudes and behaviour, on how norms of aggression and violence become embedded in societies. Emerging research is therefore raising awareness of how to challenge systemic violence in our country.
Analysis, theorising and case studies of masculinities have been rapidly increasing in books, journals, conferences, university courses and postgraduate research. It would be a tragic waste of socially valuable research if such knowledge remained confined to the academic sphere, if it were treated solely as the subject of intellectual discussion. Or if it were only the means by which postgraduates and researchers demonstrated their research skills and theoretical acumen.
We can learn so much from it about how social circumstances and histories shape individual and group behaviour. We can learn to understand different histories and contexts of gendered behaviour. And in learning, we can be empowered to develop strategic interventions and long-term solutions.
Violence against women and children, and especially domestic violence, can be so hideous that we feel powerless to change it. We can easily be overwhelmed by its enormity, and take actions that do not address the root of the problem, or that only reflect our horror and outrage.
So the challenge is how to take the important research work and knowledge further. We could consider how this work can be disseminated among wider audiences. We can think about building partnerships between centres of research, groups of researchers and even individual researchers, and policy-makers or civil society organisations. There is no doubt that connections have already been made. But in the face of the enormous battle that faces us, we are challenged to consider strengthening collaboration.
A similar situation applies to work on HIV and AIDS. Both nationally and internationally, much research on HIV and AIDS highlights women's special vulnerability to HIV infection. It also emphasises women's added burdens in providing support and care for those who are ill, even when they themselves are in need of care. The government's HIV, AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections Strategic Plan for 2000–2005 raised the need for multi-sectoral collaboration. There has been a clear recognition that HIV affects every sector of our society. Because of this, we need to draw on a vast range of national energies and resources.
Research is defined as a priority area in the plan. And it is important that the plan makes explicit provision for identifying areas of research in addition to medical research and monitoring. Such interdisciplinary additional research can take us far in dealing with the connections between HIV transmission and social relationships and identities. It can contribute enormously to raising public awareness, as well as to programmes and policies.
It is heartening to see the recent growth of research on HIV and AIDS in relation gender dynamics such as gender-based violence. It is also very encouraging to see that much research uses a human rights framework that integrates women's rights with health care and socio-economic rights.
Generally, current research raises the imperative of looking at links between power, gender, sexuality and sexual behaviour in order to shape the insight for guiding effective programmes and policy development. According to such research, health care is not a stand-alone sect oral issue requiring a one-dimensional medical response.
It requires an integrated response that is attentive to social contexts, access to resources, and the power relations that confront people. And these factors are crucial in addressing the health needs of the many women in this country. The social value of recent work on gender and health is reminiscent of the role of writing on women's health in the seventies and early 80s. During this time, publications such as the Rape Crisis newsletter, Speak and Agenda produced information and analysis dealing with women's health in relation to social conditions and relationships.
Women's health studies at universities including the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Cape Town and the University of Natal were also important sites for developing this knowledge. Today, there is not only a definite need for this work, but also far greater scope for collaboration, partnerships and support for it.
South Africa faces distinct struggles around strengthening its democracy, around poverty and diseases such as AIDS, around eradicating mindsets and behaviour that continue to harm women. Research on masculinities and HIV has made crucial breakthroughs by developing knowledge with urgent social and policy-making relevance. South Africa has a vibrant political tradition of writing on gender and health. We can build on this.
Conclusion
Through partnerships and collaboration, we can mobilise the collective skills and energies within civil societies and government. We can also harness the resources and skills of sites of research and teaching in taking social transformation forward. Our democracy is built on a proud legacy of alliances, collaboration and mobilisation among different sectors: among those in communities, workers, student activists, progressive researchers, teachers and academics.
The tradition of consolidating diverse energies to build democracy is not new to us. Let us recall this proud tradition, and let us mobilise our national resources so that we can speak even more confidently about our national commitment to building democracy.
I thank you.
Issued by: Ministry of Health
5 August 2005
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