
How can I write my story? My name is Enid Gayizana and I stay in Khayelitsha. I am the mother of six children and a single parent as my husband died. I didn’t have a job, that’s why I took the chance of selling. If you know how to trade you can sell things to get bread. Few South African men do this job – they always undermine this, they always say it is a woman’s job. But the money is the same. You can be a man or you can be a woman, but it’s the same.
When I was a little girl of just four, I remember the family domestic worker calling me to the spare bedroom to play a game. The game, she explained, entailed her lying down on the spring base single bed and me jumping over her stomach.
When the South African weekly newspaper City Press exposed a human trafficking ring operating across the Mozambique Γβ South Africa border in late March, many expressed joy at the perpetrators being caught. With the upcoming World Cup in South Africa just around the corner, there was satisfaction that at least some of the traffickers would be out of business and so not able to take advantage of the increased demand for sex workers during the mega-event.
South Africa has one of the highest rates in the world of unemployment for comparable middle-income countries. The latest official statistics show that by December 2009, around 4,2 million people, out of a total labour force of 17 million, were officially unemployed. Yet, this figure does not include almost two million individuals who have simply lost hope of ever finding a job. For women, the situation is nothing but drastic.
The announcement that South Africa would host the 2010 World Cup prompted a whirlwind of heavy investment in infrastructure, with high expectations for an economic boom. Obviously the 2010 World Cup will also boost tourism, but how far will these benefit society as a whole, not just a privileged few?
For four weeks in 2010, South Africa will be the centre of the world. The FIFA World Cup, the world’s biggest sporting event after the Olympic Games in terms of television audience, is in a class of its own.
Some years ago, a women’s NGO in South Africa published a poster with the slogan “Abusive speech is a deadly weapon,ΓΒ designed to create awareness about the impact of verbal abuse in intimate partner relationships. Little did they know that verbal abuse would become a source of national debate in the country, spurred on by careless comments uttered by ANC Youth League president Julius Malema.
The success of global economic recovery plans will depend on how far governments are willing to relook at models traditionally advocated for by economists to start embracing the informal sector model where women are the majority.
Women from Africa and Asia are pointing accusing fingers at their governments and donors for neither analysing climate change from a gender perspective nor putting in place mechanisms to cushion them from its ravages. Discussing the matter at the CSW54 Beijing+ 15 Review held 1-12 March, they say most governments have an idea of the broader impact of climate change on the well-being of their countries, but are yet to focus on its gender dimension.
Women are yet to make significant inroads into the media 15 years after the Beijing Platform of Action recognised its centrality in advancing women’s rights. Preliminary findings of the 2010 Global Media Monitoring Project conducted by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) suggests that women constitute less than a quarter of those interviewed, heard, seen or read about in mainstream broadcast and print news.