WUNRN
North
Africa: Progress & Challenges for Women's Rights
Mary
Kimani - August 9, 2008
Photo:
Working for a better life - Young women attending an adult literacy class in
Hayet Laouni is a member of Tunisia's Senate and an owner of her own
maritime business. She credits her success to the liberal approach to women's
rights that the government has shown since independence.
"I am very grateful to my country," she says. "I was born and
grew up in a part of the world where life is supposed to be hard for most
people, but harder for women."
She is not alone. While many people outside the region view predominately
Muslim North Africa as rigidly hostile to women's rights, they have in fact
witnessed a decade of substantial reform and the achievement of some
improvement in the status of women.
Reforming family codes
Much of the reform has been in countries' "family codes", sets of
laws guiding the role and status of women in marriage, as well as their rights
in divorce and custody matters.
The family code has been an important focus for women's rights activists
because its laws are "absolutely critical and fundamental in Muslim
society", says Mounira Charrad, a Tunisian-born university professor who
has researched women's issues in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
Those laws, Charrad says, "address issues that are at the core of social
life". Successfully reforming them, she says, can improve women's rights
in marriage, access to divorce and ability to get custody of their children.
"When the present Tunisian government allowed a woman to pass on citizenship
to her children, this created a seismic cultural change in the society,"
Charrad noted at a conference last year. "This law challenged the entire
patrilineal concept of the family."
Much of the credit for progress lies with the dynamic women's movements that
came into being in North Africa during the 1980s and 1990s, explains Valentine
M Moghadam, who promotes equality between men and women for the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
Between law and practice
But progress has been halting and uneven. In 2005, Egypt granted women expanded
divorce rights, for example, but efforts to change the law to allow women to
travel without the permission of a husband or father were dropped by the
government for fear that they were too radical to pass.
Moghadam notes that North African countries continue to support social
practices that discriminate against women and are inconsistent with
international treaties. Importantly, they are also against the laws of those
countries.
"Egypt's Constitution grants equality to all citizens," she points
out, but Egypt's family law contradicts that "by placing women under the
guardianship", or legal control, of their fathers. Moghadam also notes
that many discriminatory laws and practices in North Africa and the Middle East
are seen as directly resulting from Islamic injunctions, while they in fact
derive from tribal or pre-Islamic cultural practices.
Leila Rhiwi, a former director of a women's rights group in Morocco, who is
currently the women's rights coordinator for Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia for
the UN Development Fund for Women, observes that in many North African
countries, "what we have seen is a change in the law, not a change in
society". However, she says, "changes in the law make changes in the
society possible".
Charrad agrees. "Legal changes made a difference in countries like
Tunisia. The reforms happened in the 1950s. Women can now file for divorce more
easily and custody is easier", but, she says, "socially, divorce remains
very difficult because divorced women find themselves treated as
outcasts".
"Despite the challenges," she continues, "we can no longer say
that in the Muslim world it is hard to change women's rights. Women have really
gained very significant rights in Tunisia and Morocco. We need to move away
from the generalised statements about that part of the world and come up with a
more nuanced way of looking at it. Once we see that some women have gained
substantial rights, we can learn from those cases."
Entrenching new rights
Nowhere have women in North Africa made greater progress than in reproductive
rights -- in fact, notably better than in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle
East.
Tunisian law protects the right of a woman to decide whether to practise birth
control or have an abortion. The World Health Organisation estimates that
contraceptive use in Tunisia grew from 24% in 1980 (the current rate in most of
sub-Saharan Africa) to 63% in 2007. Nearly all Tunisian women live within 5km
of a source of family planning and they typically wait until about age 27 to
get married, compared to about age 16 in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle
East.
In Egypt, 96% of women live near a family planning centre and about 60% use the
centres' services. In Algeria, the government reimburses people for purchasing
contraceptives. And, in Algeria and Tunisia more than 90% of births take place
in public health facilities so that many more mothers and babies survive
childbirth.
To help women use their rights, advocacy organisations have pressed governments
to give better access to the courts. Egypt introduced a new system of child
support and alimony and has brought divorce and inheritance issues under one
judicial authority.
Rebecca Chiao of the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights says that since the
changes were made in Egypt, her group has helped about 6 000 women
annually to understand and use the new regulations.
Entrenching these rights requires greater women's participation in political
life, Rhiwi concludes, and here progress has been slow. It was only in 2002
that Morocco's political parties agreed to reserve 30 seats out of 325 for
women in Parliament, while in Egypt women make up a meagre 8% of
parliamentarians and occupy few Cabinet posts.
Those numbers remain a major hurdle, she acknowledges, and one that must be
overcome if women are to continue to make progress. "We have to ensure
that the changes will be real, effective and institutionalised."
Mary Kimani is a writer for United Nations Africa Renewal magazine.
Reprinted from UN Africa
Renewal
Source: Mail & Guardian Online
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