The 90's in South Africa is destined to be stamped with two major achievements. One is the birth of a constitutional state and multiparty democracy based on one-person-one-vote. The other is the constitutional commitment to eliminating discrimination in our country, particularly the racial and gender discrimination which lie at the heart of our underdevelopment, poverty and the gross inequalities that continue to haunt us.

The racial and gender 'equality' guaranteed in our Bill of Rights is the equality of access across the races and across the sexes to all of society's resources including, for example, income, education, healthcare, land, credit and decision-making power in all fields of human endeavour.

It is the inequality of access to such resources that defines the power relations in society, white domination of blacks on the one hand and male domination of females on the other.

'Empowerment' in the context of the Bill of Rights is thus about creating the conditions to bring about equality of access to resources between the different groups in our society, mainly between blacks and whites and between men and women.

August 9 marks the 5th anniversary of South African Women's Day since SA's first majority-led government took power. It is therefore appropriate to ask how far we have travelled in these five years along the path to gender equality.

The best answer to this question would have been available if targets for gender equality in respect of each of society's resources could have been set in 1994, targets like: such-and -such a percentage of women and such-and-such a percentage of men have access to the resource of healthcare now. We aim to narrow this gender gap by raising the percentage of women who have access to this resource to x% by 1998. Then we would have been able to check whether our targets have been met and so measure our achievements, thereby developing a mechanism to monitor our policies, laws, structures and machineries for effectiveness of delivery.

But such targets presuppose data about access to each resource. The apartheid regime was notorious for its lack of data, let alone those about the differing conditions of women and men. So it was impossible to set such targets in 1994. Fortunately, however, apartheid's data vacuum is being filled by the CSS, among others. Yesterday, for example, saw their launch of a booklet on gender statistics entitled 'Women and Men in South Africa'. The statistics included are needed by government to execute its planning functions, including target setting and monitoring, to convert the promise of gender equality into practice.

These statistics in themselves thus represent a milestone on the path to gender equality. Earlier milestones include government's ratification in 1995 of international treaties on gender equality such as the Beijing Platform of Action and The Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, as well as the setting up of machineries to promote gender equality like The Office on the Status of Women, the Parliamentary Committee on the Quality of Life and Status of Women, the Commission on Gender Equality and gender desks within national and provincial departments. Then there is the new budgetary process, the Medium Term Expenditure Framework, which can be used to women's advantage better than the previous one could. And a myriad of laws and policies have been or are about to be enacted as part of the process of empowering women to gain equal access with men to society's resources.

Legalising abortion, for example, recognises that unless women have control over their reproductive lives, they cannot be expected to take equal advantage with men of opportunities outside the home. Again, the Employment Equity and Skills Development Acts as they apply to women are designed to help them into the formal economy from which they have been largely excluded. Similarly with the affirmative action policy of 1994 with respect to ANC women parliamentarians, which has led to the current 29% of women in the national parliament, 18% of women ministers and 60% of deputy women ministers. Such figures have contributed significantly to SA's good rating at 20th (out of 94 countries) on the UN's 1997 Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) scale. The GEM measures gender inequality in key areas of economic and political participation and decision-making: the lower the rating, the less gender inequality in participation in these key areas.

The UN's Gender Development Index (GDI) measures the achievement in those basic capabilities of the female population of a country that are required to contribute to their society's development. These capabilities are life expectancy, educational attainment and an income that is adequate for a reasonable standard of living. When the achievement in these basic capabilities is measured for the population as a whole, the measure is called the Human Development Index (HDI). The difference between the HDI and the GDI amounts to a measure of gender inequality in such basic capabilities. In 1996, SA's HDI ranking was 78 and its GDI ranking 74 out of 137 countries, a difference of 4. In 1997, our HDI ranking was 76 and our GDI ranking 71 out of 146 countries, a difference of 5, representing a larger gender inequality than in 1996. This is hardly surprising given the 'feminisation of poverty', with women's incomes dropping more rapidly than men's, a phenomenon different from but related to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the poor in this country are women. This fact has led to the acknowledgement, in mind if not in heart, that poverty alleviation and job creation need a special focus on women, given the incontrovertible evidence that women's incomes go further towards household survival and human capital investment than men's. Such acceptance that women are a country's 'engine out of poverty' is another milestone towards gender equality.

But enormous challenges lie ahead. One is to reinstate custom and indigenous law within the framework of the Bill of Rights. Another is to quantify the vital contribution to the economy made by the informal sector and to regulate it in a way that recognises this contribution. Another is to curb the violent crime against women. Another is to get more women working at local government level, at the interface of grassroots needs and policy prescriptions. There are many more.

Women cannot meet such challenges alone. We need our men alongside us to help us bring about change. As Danny Glover, recently appointed unpaid Ambassador to the UNDP's poverty eradication programme put it 'We make our lives by what we give'.