Mrs. Tibaijuka demands better legislation to
underwrite women’s empowerment
Nairobi, 31 January 2006—UN-HABITAT Executive
Director Mrs. Anna Tibaijuka on Monday called on world
governments to enact legislation that will ensure that
women achieved gender equality in accessing human
settlements.
Mrs. Tibaijuka said that meeting gender-related
targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) would
depend to a large extent on bringing about the required
changes to a myriad of laws and restrictive legislation
that remain major obstacles to gender equality and the
empowerment of women.
“In order to remove the barriers to gender equality
in the human settlements sector, we must deal with
housing laws and by-laws, urban planning regulations,
laws dealing with property rights and inheritance
rights, access to credit, and the list goes on,” she
said.
Mrs. Tibaijuka was speaking in Nairobi on the
occasion of the Joint Meeting of the Inter Agency
Network on Women and Gender Equality (IANGWE) and the
Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developments
(OECD).
The two-day meeting on Aid Modalities and the
Promotion of Gender Equality brought together some 50
gender experts from across the globe.
A significant challenge faced by all working for
promoting the internationally agreed development goals
is to guarantee that gender equality, and women’s needs
in particular, are addressed adequately, Mrs. Tibaijuka
said. She challenged the participants saying that as
gender experts, they were well placed to assist
countries to mainstream gender and equity concerns into
the budgeting process by providing guidelines and
technical support.
“Poverty within urban areas means not only very low
incomes and associated hunger, but also overcrowded
housing conditions and exposure to a number of hazards
such as floods, landslides, earthquake and fire. The
urban poor are continually at risk, by virtue of both
their precarious incomes and of the natural and human
made hazards to which they are exposed daily,” she said
adding that women and the children they support were the
worst off.
IANGWE Chair Ms. Rachel Mayanja said that a ten-year
of review of the Beijing Platform for Action
demonstrated that both donor and partner countries
needed to do more to halt and reverse the increasing
poverty among women.
“While policies purporting to address gender gaps
have been put in place in many countries, the real
political will of implementing those, including by
providing adequate funding, is lacking.
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