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Peace of mind piece of land
2006-07-13 08:28:18
By Ritah Wanza
While women struggle to attain economic empowerment there are many stumbling blocks that hinder their efforts including culture.
The HIV/Aids pandemic has worsened the situation. Its impact and broad implication must be dealt with at the policy level so as to address women’s need for access to land, food and water. Our Staff Writer Joyce Mkinga reports
WHEN the devastation of AIDS enters a household, it is the women who take on the burden of added responsibilities.
In hard-hit communities all over the globe, women are caring for sick and dying family members around the clock, while trying to fulfill their regular household responsibilities, such as child care, household maintenance and food preparation.
In sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic has hit with terrible ferocity, women not only prepare the food, but but also grow it.
When women farmers are pulled out of production, many households are pushed to the brink of starvation.
Women’s ability to shoulder these extra tasks falters most dramatically when it comes to the three life sustaining essentials: water, food and land.
It is not uncommon for women in rural areas to spend a good part of their day collecting water, entailing hours of walking.
According to a survey on the HIV/Aids burden done by Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP) a woman could use up to 24 buckets of water to care for a full-blown AIDS patient every day.
This is not hard to comprehend because of severe diarrhoea patients must be washed, clothed and bedding laundered five, or more times a day.
As women’s days are spent fetching water, preparing food and cleaning patients, there is less time to perform the tasks that sustain life, such as cultivating crops or earning a small income.
A study in South Africa, for instance, showed that in almost half the households surveyed the primary care-giver for an AIDS patient had taken time off from formal or informal employment, or from schooling.
Women and girls may lose as much as 60 per cent of time from other housework or cultivation tasks, affecting the ability of poor households to grow food for consumption or sale.
To make things worse, the widows of men who have already died from the disease no longer have land to grow the food that will keep them alive, because in many places single and widowed women are denied the right to own land and property in their own name.
When combined with poverty and gender inequality, HIV/Aids creates a deadly scenario for women and their families.
Even when family members are in hospital, women must often provide care and food, because of inadequate and under-resourced public health programmes.
The TGNP Programme Officer Gema Akilimali says that policy makers should be convinced that women’s labour cannot continue to be taken for granted because they are the ones who suffer the consequence of the disease.
If you want to see how exactly women are affected ’Sit outside Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam for one day and watch the women go in and out, bearing food and clean clothes, taking their cringe responsibilities right into the hospital’.
She asks the policy makers to think about what this means for each woman who must leave work at home to travel to and from the hospital and provide many hours of care each day.
If women themselves are sick from AIDS-related illnesses as they are in ever-increasing numbers, how much harder is it to cope with the additional care-giving responsibilities that AIDS places upon them? Where is the time to take even a part-time job, or buy and sell goods in the market place?
Where is the possibility for the children, particularly girls, to go to school when needed to help in the home? What possibilities are there for young women and girls to compensate from the increased poverty that AIDS brings?
The impact on the household of women’s increased care-giving burden has broad implications, and must ultimately be dealt with at the policy level.
Governments must urgently provide adequately staffed hospital wards or clinics to care for AIDS patients and take legislative and other measures to address women’s need for access to land, food and water.
There have been some encouraging steps. Several countries, for example, have passed laws or simply encouraged communities to support women’s rights to own land and other property.
Tanzania is one of those countries whereby in 1999, the parliament passed the Land Act of 1999 which gives rights to woman to own land.
The United Nations institution that advocating for women development (UNIFEM) has been supporting different forums for women ownership.
According to the organization report presented at the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women and Beijing plus ten conference held in New York last year, women needed support to effectively gain their rights.
The reports highlighted a case of women refugee from Rwanda.
When refugees and displaced people began to return home at the end of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, widows and unmarried women faced a crisis, without husbands or fathers they had no access to land.
Women’s organizations began to advocate changes in the law. UNIFEM was in the forefront to support these organizations.
Parliamentarians, helping it create a Parliamentary Gender Desk that paved the way for gender - sensitive legislation.
In 2001, following an intensive lobbying campaign, the Parliament adopted a new inheritance and succession law guaranteeing women and girls the right to inherit land and property.
The report says that such laws are a necessary starting point - but not all that is needed, as can be seen in Zimbabwe.
Although Zimbabwe has passed a law allowing women to own land, the practice of deferring to custom in matters of land and property means it is rarely enforced.
The UNIFEM Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women - by supporting the Network of Zimbabwean Positive Women - helped Nyaradzo Makambanga claim her right to land.
When she became ill from AIDS related diseases in 1998 she was sent away by her husband who refused to support her. All of the land was in his name. ’I was shattered. My hopes and dreams had come to an end’, she says.
’I thought I was going to die and leave my children.’ With the help of the Network she learned about the laws and practices governing women’s right to own land, as well as how to work around them.
With new-found confidence she approached her village chief who agreed to assign her a plot of land to cultivate.
She was able to purchase seeds through the Network’s revolving fund and her new life began.
She later took on the role of advising women in similar predicaments. ’I would not want to see other women go through the difficulties I went through because of ignorance’, she says.
’If I had known that I had my own rights, even though I was married, I would not have ended up being HIV-positive.
What women need is peace of mind and a piece of land to cultivate and be equal to men’.
But land rights are only one part of the policy and legislative changes that are needed.
Water, which is critical, is in increasingly short supply in many countries; even more alarming, it is increasingly subject to privatization.
As access to water becomes more and more difficult, women will have to spend even more time trying to collect it.
Beyond this, funding to reverse the spread of HIV/Aids must be specifically targeted to women.
Poverty and gender discrimination have turned a devastating disease into a social and economic crisis.
Ending the crisis requires the infusion of serious resources into programmes that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, programmes that are grounded in the knowledge and experience of women living and working in communities.
If we lose this moment, the future will be bleak for the vast majority of women in developing countries who are increasingly both affected and infected by HIV/Aids.
If we act as we can and must, the year 2015 could mark the taking of grant strides towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals of eradicating poverty and HIV/Aids and supporting gender equality.
And we will be able to take pride in helping to realise Nyaradzo Makambanga’s wish for women the world over: peace of mind, a piece of land and equality with men.
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