GENDER
The cultural attributes of a community have a very strong influence on societal
gender relations. Culture and tradition have fashioned out society in such a way that
there is a very strong relation between the type of work, rights and access, and gender.
With regards to the way gender issues are treated, there is not much cultural diversity
among the tribes who reside in the basin. All cultures within the Zambezi Basin place
women in a subordinate position.
Roles of women and men in the basin
In general, men's traditional role in society is to be the breadwinner and defender of
the family against any danger. While both men and women participate in the economic
spheres, women are assigned additional obligations, which fall within their domestic
domain such as food preparation, and productive and reproductive roles. As society
develops, women's roles shift to suit both the household social needs, but still within
the traditional division of labour. Regarding women's tasks, most of them are performed in
and around the home, making them homebound.
Division of labour
Substantial evidence is available documenting the existing unequal division of labour
between women and men in the basin. In rural Tanzania, for example, women work more than
14 hours a day compared with men's 10 hours. Declining resource availability and very high
rates of male out-migration from the rural areas in search of employment have increased
labour demands on women.
In Zimbabwe, men's work usually has seasonal peaks (ploughing and cattle herding) or is
done once in many years (constructing housing and granaries). This gives men an ability to
take seasonal or permanent employment elsewhere. By contrast, some of the women's tasks
may be seasonal, for example, weeding and harvesting, but social reproductive tasks are
daily chores. These are not transferable to men due to cultural practice.
The gender statistics in the Zambezi Basin reveal that:
- Women constitute a majority of the population, up to 65 percent, as most men have
migrated to urban centres some of which are outside the basin, in search of employment.
- Women constitute a larger number of the poor.
- Women are rural based to a larger extent than men, and remain on the periphery of human
development and governance.
- Women have access to a lower educational level than men.
- Women work longer hours than men.
- Most of women's work is unpaid, and their share of household income and decisions are
not in proportion to their labour.
Key gender issues that impact on the environment are related to access to and ownership
of resources. Studies indicate that while women carry a heavier load in production and
reproduction, they do not enjoy similar rights in terms of access to resources. Within a
community, rights and access to resources are also often organised through kinship,
gender-based division of labour and type of production. Men commonly have rights to
resources such as land, water, and fisheries. They even have rights to control and
allocate certain amounts of women's and children's labour to crops for which men have
overall control and retain revenue. Women generally do not have rights to most of the
natural resources and do not have such rights over men's labour. In natural resources
management, men commonly have full disposal rights while women have use rights.
Throughout the region, the pattern is that women have less access to the means of
production such as land, and support services such as credit. In Zambia, for example, 90
percent of the land available for agriculture falls under traditional land controlled by
chiefs who follow patriarchal principles in its allocation. Women have no direct access to
land in this situation.
Under Tswana Customary law, women's access to land in Botswana is secondarythrough men.
Although everyone should have equal access to land, in reality, access is differentiated
by gender. Unmarried and divorced women are among the poorest households without access to
productive land because of lack of means to use the land. In the rural villages, women are
often refused allocation in their own right and advised to apply for land through their
husbands who have marital power over household assets.
Food insecurity and malnutrition in most of rural Africa can partly be attributed to
lack of access and control over land by women. Closely related to the issue of land is
livestock ownership. Men generally own more cattle than women throughout the Zambezi
Basin. In Botswana, for example, of the total national herd, women own only 14 percent.
This marginalisation from cattle ownership of women not only reflects female poverty, but
also means that those that have land but no access to cattle have no access to draught
power for ploughing. They end up ploughing late, ploughing fewer hectares and getting
lower yields. This has a bearing on household food security.
Water and sanitation
Access to safe water supplies and sanitation in the region is generally limited. Over
50 percent of the people in the SADC-region have no access to sanitation and over 40
percent are without access to safe drinking water. Due to water scarcity in many riparian
countries, women, particularly those in rural areas, are forced to walk long distances to
fetch water. According to a World Bank estimate, some African women use 40 percent of
their daily nutritional intake travelling to collect water.
Another survey, carried out by UNICEF in rural areas of Namibia, found that
female-headed households are 20 minutes farther away from water sources in the dry season
compared to the wet season. While estimates vary in the various countries, in Zambia, for
example, access to protected water sources in the rural and peri-urban areas range between
25-60 percent. Access to sanitation ranges between 40-50 percent in rural and peri-urban
areas.
Due to environmental degradation and deforestation, women in the region now spend more
time looking for fuelwood, water and food, and have less time to cook, forcing them to cut
back on the number of cooked meals and their nutritional value. In Mozambique, women spend
15.3 hours during the dry season and 2.9 hours during the wet season, each week drawing
and carrying water. In Malawi, a study indicates that each household spends five percent
of all days and all nights in a year collecting water.
Energy
Fuelwood is used for domestic purposes such as cooking and heating. It is also used in
crop processing, beer brewing, making pottery, fish-smoking, brick-burning and in other
small-scale rural based industries. The intensive use of fuelwood is contributing to
serious environmental degradation, due to deforestation and ultimately soil erosion and
poor soil fertility. But contrary to some beliefs, women are more of victims than
perpetrators of deforestation because generally they obtain fuelwood from branches and
deadwood, not from cutting live trees.
The rate of deforestation was about 0.7 percent during the period 1990-95 in the
SADC-region. At present rates of deforestation, one-third of the SADC forests will
disappear by the middle of 21st century. Since collecting fuelwood is mainly a woman's
task, she is most affected by fuel scarcity. In Malawi, for example, were forests are
disappearing at the rate of 3.5 percent per year, women spend six to nine hours per week
collecting fuelwood for household use.
Tackling gender inequalities Legal aspects
Efforts have over the years been made to advance women's status as well as to protect
and safeguard human rights in the basin. At the regional level, heads of state and
government from the southern African region have committed themselves to protecting and
promoting human rights of women and children by adopting the Gender and Development
Declaration in September 1997.
Gender has been incorporated into the SADC agenda and a gender unit has been
established within the SADC Secretariat in Gaborone. Some SADC sectors have also developed
sectoral gender policies. The SADC Environment and Land Management Sector (ELMS) has an
elaborate gender policy and the SADC Water Sector Coordination Unit (WSCU) is working on a
programme to empower women and improve their participation in the sector. At the national
level, all countries in the basin have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The CEDAW, dubbed as the global
constitution for women, provides a basis for realising equality between women and men.
In Mozambique, the constitution guarantees, all citizens the right to live in a
balanced natural environment and the duty to defend it. The government also passed an
Environmental Law, in 1997 that aims to achieve the country's sustainable development, and
places special emphasis on the role of women in environmental management.
A section of the Malawi National Environmental Policy calls for integration of gender,
youth and children concerns in environmental planning and decisions at all levels to
ensure sustainable social and economic development. The efforts to address gender and
mainstream it in all aspects of development received a boost by the endorsement of gender
equality at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, 1995 (also known
as the Beijing Conference). This endorsement is seen as one of the most radical changes
that have taken place in recent years.
Challenges
Legal and policy aspects
Despite the legal reforms that are in place, women in the basin still suffer gender
discrimination and violations of their rights. It is usually assumed by legislators that
the law affects women and men equally, but the reality is different. Many women in the
basin do not exercise the rights that the laws specifically guarantee them due to many
factors.
Therefore, law reform in the basin must be complemented with the adoption of targeted
interventions aimed at correcting gender inequalities and equalising opportunities for
women and men. A real and critical challenge remains, in that even where laws providing
for gender equality have been put in place, mechanisms for enforcement of these laws are
either weak or non-existent.
Although countries in the basin have a number of policies that, directly and
indirectly, protect the environment, not many of these incorporate gender. Many of the
policies tend to be blind to the fact that women relate to the environment differently
from men.
Women remain largely absent at all levels of policy formulation and decision-making in
natural resource and environmental management, conservation, protection and
rehabilitation. Their experience and skills in advocacy for and monitoring of proper
natural resource management too often remain marginalised in policy-making and
decision-making bodies as well as in educational institutions and environment-related
agencies at the management level.
Gender specific research
Information on the extent and severity of the various environmental problems in the
Zambezi Basin and their impact on women as compared to men is very scanty. This is due to
lack of gender specific research in the basin. There is need for more data and indicators
to highlight the important gender disparities in the Zambezi Basin, which may help address
the current deficiences. Understanding gender issues is a logical part of the
resource-sensitive approach to development. Therefore, gender differences and inequalities
must be taken into account if development interventions are to be effective in serving the
needs of women as well as men, now and into the future.
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