wfn.org | Apologies and Story on NEPAD AND AFRICAN WOMEN

[cfouke@ncccusa.org]

For Immediate Release
AACC Media Team: (011) 237 966 3059 or 3063

Note to Editors: Apologies for yesterday's multiple transmissions - our 
NCC listserve threw a couple of big surprises at us yesterday.	I trust we 
havze worked out the bugs - we hope! - in advance of the AACC Assembly, 
which starts Sunday.  Plese bear with us - above all we want you to have 
the nezs from the Assembly!  Carol Fouke-Mpoyo

NEPAD RISKS DEEPENING AFRICAN WOMEN’S POVERTY, WANGUSA SAYS

Yaounde, Cameroon – The much-touted New Partnership for Africa’s 
Development (NEPAD) risks deepening African women’s poverty, the
Kampala, 
Uganda-based coordinator of the African Women’s Economic Policy Network

told more than 200 women Friday (Nov. 21) in an All Africa Conference of 
Churches pre-Assembly meeting here.

NEPAD, launched in 2002, was conceived as a framework to guide African 
people to steer their own development and governance, said Hellen Grace 
Akwii Wangusa, the network’s coordinator.  “But the policy
choices under 
NEPAD make sure women get more poverty,” she said.

“It’s a document at the macro level,” Wangusa said. 
“It
doesn’t capture 
the micro realities.”  NEPAD favors putting raw materials into the
market 
and keeping labor costs low.  “That labor has a woman’s
face,” she said.

For example, “the promotion of high value crops for export has had a 
direct impact on women who have lost land that used to be put under food 
crops” such as pumpkin and potatoes, she said.  Women’s labor is
stretched 
to cover such labor-intensive foods as vanilla, flowers and spices that 
are not part of the local diet.  

As agriculture is thus commercialized, men step in and women lose food for 
their families and for sale in local markets, a mainstay of women, she 
said, undermining food security and putting them at risk of exploitation 
and abuse by foreign investors.

“If poverty in Africa has a women’s face, then the long-term
objective No. 
1 to eradicate poverty in Africa ought to be informed by analysis that 
would have centered women in designing the socio-economic and political 
framework to address poverty within NEPAD,” Wangusa said.

It is that kind of analysis that would have ensured the development of 
supporting rather than conflicting policies to permanently eliminate 
gender disparities, she said, in concrete programs for empowerment of 
women to influence governance and policy making.

Too much of NEPAD echoes the Structural Adjustment Programs of previous 
decades, which meant cuts in health, education and other essential social 
services in exchange for loans from the international monetary bodies.

“NEPAD fails to call for total debt cancellation but embrace failed
debt 
relief, which place a heavy burden on women in particular,” Wangusa 
said. “Debt relief reinforces conditions for adjustment and spending on

crucial basic social services such as health, water, and education. The 
burden is then shifted from government to the household. 

“Hence NEPAD fails to attack the fundamental structural causes of
women’s 
poverty and inequality. These are discriminatory laws and cultural norms, 
limited access to land, skewed public expenditures and macroeconomic 
policies,” she said.  

NEPAD needs to better recognize the interrelatedness of such problems as 
poverty, clean water, agricultural policy and HIV/AIDS and to bring a 
gender-based analysis to seeking solutions, Wangusa said.

Given that women carry the responsibility for feeding their families, HIV+ 
women need access to anti-retroviral drugs to keep them healthy, she 
said.  NEPAD also needs to build in support for women whose time 
cultivating food crops is being cut into by their responsibility to care 
for family members suffering from HIV/AIDS.  

She said NEPAD needs to ask, “In rural areas, is it going to be a
priority 
to provide water” when control of water resources is put into the hands
of 
private companies with incomes ten times that of some nations?

NEPAD is called upon “to seek a new consensus away from Washington and 
institutional arrangement to ensure economic, social justice, and gender 
equity,” she said.   

Wangusa called on the All Africa Conference of Churches “to consider 
strategically positioning itself with the African Union and the NEPAD 
secretariat. This would ensure monitoring is done as well influencing 
decisions made at these institutions.

“The AACC needs to step up its advocacy role in partnership with like 
minded organizations because the global trends and events require a 
concerted an timely response especially in today’s context when the
only 
super power is redefining security, partners of the willing/allies,”
she 
concluded.

Wangusa also is scheduled to address the full AACC Assembly during its 
meeting here Nov. 23-27.  Women’s and Youth Pre Assemblies were held
Nov. 
19-22 and will feed recommendations into the full Assembly – which
meets 
every five years or so and is the highlight of Africa’s ecumenical 
calendar.

The All Africa Conference of Churches, based in Nairobi, Kenya, comprises 
120 million African Christians in 169 member churches and national 
councils of churches in 39 countries.

The African Women’s Economic Policy Network (AWEPON), which Wangusa
heads, 
involves 20 countries and focuses on gender, faith and economics.  The 
network works around the principle that women have a fundamental right to 
shape economic policies that impinge on their lives and their families, 
according to an AWEPON brochure.

Carol Fouke-Mpoyo    AACC

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