Date: 14/02/2008
Source: The Presidency
Title: SA: Mlambo-Ngcuka: Pan African Women's Organisation conference

Address by Her Excellency Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Deputy President of the Republic of South Africa, at the 9th Pan African Women's Organisation (PAWO) Conference 

Thank you very much Comrade Mavivi for the welcome. I would like to acknowledge the President of the ANC Women's League, Comrade Mapisa-Nqakula and also to express my appreciation to the moving words of the Secretary General of PAWO, Madame Assetou Koite, and join everybody in thanking her for her sterling work and loyalty to the women of Africa.

I want to acknowledge Madame Speaker and Chairperson of the ANC Ms Mbete, the colleagues on the podium and in the house, Ministers and Deputy Ministers, our veterans who are here from South Africa and also those from the continent. I would like to thank everybody who made today and this coming-together possible. Madame General Secretary, this conference is indeed long awaited. It must have been a long walk to freedom for us to arrive to this day today, because we all know how much effort, investment and sacrifices she has put in this organisation.

I'd also like to echo the words of the President of the Women's League, "The importance of this gathering is to focus on concrete outcomes, because the problems of the women of Africa are real." Thank you very much to the countries which contributed to making sure that we have the space today to focus on those issues. I do not want to forget Madame General Secretary's own country's contribution, but also Angola's contribution in hand-holding this delicate organisation up to this point.

Today, we are here to embrace an agenda of renewal of the women of Africa as we face the challenges of shaping our future and the 21st century. This century in many ways should have been one that is full of promise for the women of Africa and the women of the world in general. We acknowledge the progress that has been made, the milestone that has been achieved, and a greatly improved environment for doing the kind of job that has to be done to support women.

We also acknowledge the complex world that we live in, the heavier burden that the women carry, especially the women of our continent and the developing world in general. We therefore do not have the luxury not to use the strength, the benefits and the insights that we have gained in the last decades to make sure that we are stronger as we move forward to face a more complex world. In many ways today we have been afforded many platforms as women.

That is why many of us who are here are also able to play leadership roles in the countries that we are in, in addition to the fact that we are sisters, we are mothers, and we are grandmothers. We are here most of us because we also have capacity, opportunities and possibilities to make the world better for women. Doing it individually we are weaker. Doing it in an interconnected manner, we are stronger. The African continent in the advent of the African Union (AU) is also in a greater position to address the challenges facing women. Many of the decisions that have been taken by this institution support women in many ways.

However, the concrete benefits for the masses of our women are yet to be seen. That is where we come in, both in our own countries, in our regions as well as in the continent at large. We have many challenges that will either make us shape the 21st century, or that will impact negatively on the women of Africa. These include the burden of disease that is upon women, HIV and AIDS being one of the most visible that ravages women and leaves children vulnerable and orphaned.

The challenge of school dropouts among girls, teen pregnancy, which then spell chronic poverty and possibility of perpetual exploitation, is still a challenge that we are to yet conquer. There is a need to ensure that we use the limited economic opportunities in our countries to benefit the majority of grassroots women whose needs to fight poverty are actually quiet modest, so that they are able to take the first step to break the cycle of poverty in a sustainable manner.

When one looks at the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it is very clear that if we are able to address the challenges of women, most of those development goals would be achieved and Africa could even excel. When one thinks about poverty, which is the crosscutting theme in those goals, women are probably the only and the most reliable fighters against poverty. If we are able to conquer poverty of women, we would have conquered poverty of children. If we conquer poverty of women, it means we would have conquered inter-generational poverty.
In our struggles against poverty as a continent and as countries, as policymakers and as business people, it is not enough for us to fight for relieving women and poor households from poverty.

It is important to reverse chronic poverty. As a result of interventions that we make, whether we are governments or non-governmental organisations (NGOs), we actually create a possibility for the families and the women that we interact with not to be poor. The most important is to make sure that we reduce a number of families that are classified as poor in a sustainable way. I would like to dwell on this issue because maybe we have downplayed the role of the family in poverty alleviation and the importance of investing directly in a family as a unit and an institution in a society through which we can reverse poverty.

We are all who we are, those of us who are not poor because of our families, more than our governments, institutions and everything else. We are who we are because someone believed in investing in our education. In the main, someone in our family was able to acquire enough education to be able to educate us. As a result they have given us something that nobody can take away from us. It does not matter what government comes in place. It does not matter what country we go to. It does not matter what circumstances we face, we will always be able to fight back. By fighting poverty we will be able to pass on to the next generation a better life.

I believe we have a simple strategy for each household to overcome poverty. We will be able, over time, to talk of an Africa that has been able to reduce substantially the number of households that are poor. We can do this by being able to look at a family and do an income transfer of a grant which by itself will not eradicate poverty; a situational analysis of every family; the human capital tragedy of this family; to check who in this family stands the best chance of being educated so that they become the turnaround strategist of that family. We therefore invest in them and we contract with them so that the alleviation and addressing the poverty of the poor is not something that we do for the poor, but we do together with the poor.

The contract is with the state, the NGOs and with women to support the families that we collaborate with. The family owes us a contract, and we work together to turn around the situation. In each family the most reliable person to work with would be the woman. If we are able in each family to find a women-based-turnaround-strategy responsible and contracted to work with us to address the poverty of that family, we will do harm on poverty, not poverty doing harm on us.

In many of our countries we are committed to accessible education for all our children and girl-children, notwithstanding the challenge that we face of quality, infrastructure and other challenges. Therefore in our household-targeted-turnaround-strategy, for each family, we are clear that by the time we are through with this family, we would have eradicated any hopelessness that is brought by lack of education. We remove hunger because hunger is obviously the most undignified situation to be in when you are poor that we address the education and access to basic infrastructure, security and other things.

We invest in education of the girl-children, of the young women, and we are convinced that many young people that we regard as young and poor are actually people who should go back to school. To try and launch them into the labour market without appropriate skills is to launch them into chronic poverty. Rather take a few years to keep them in school, to strengthen them so that they can fight for themselves. Young mothers become dependents of children who receive a grant instead of being the breadwinners so that they can support all their children. The challenge that we have is that those who become young parents deserve a grant from the state, because they are born of poor parents.

Investing in young people becomes very crucial. When we are able to invest in women and to totally address their poverty status, we are then able to talk about the fact that some of us have been supported by women, have been made by women to be who we are. We are able to talk about ploughing back substantially.
As long as we can count in most of our countries the handful of women who are middle- and upper-class, clearly we have not being able to deliver the dream of the 21st century for the woman of Africa.

The delivery of the dream of the 21st century for the women of Africa depends on numbers of women who are benefiting substantially. As we discuss and work in this conference, we urge you to assist and guide us. Those of us, who have policy responsibilities, should sharpen both our minds and everything that we need so that we can be better focused and more effective. Doing that also implies that we have to make choices.

I would like to urge you that when it comes to the total emancipation of women, a combination of educational interventions and investing in economic empowerment of women becomes a powerful combination. For a long time most of the work that we did, because we saw the plights and misery of women, was in the social context. The unintended consequences of that have been men were able to move ahead in economic empowerment. It is only now that we are trying to make women catch up.

It is important that we put the issue of economic empowerment of women on a higher pedestal. The absence of economic empowerment is what makes a lot of women depend on men and tolerate abusive relationships. I wish you good luck in the meeting that you have and once more I want to say I take off my hat to our Secretary General for her courage, dedication and devotion. When the women write the history of Africa there will be a lot to say about you.

Thank you.