Terms of Reference of the Committee

The Joint Standing Committee on the Improvement of the Quality of Life and Status of Women was permanently established in June 1998 to monitor and oversee progress with regard to the improvement of the quality of life and status of women in South Africa, with specific reference to the government's commitments in that regard made in Beijing and with regard to the implementation of the provisions of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Committee to have the power to take evidence and call for papers.

The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women

The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is a statement of minimum standards that governments need to meet to ensure that there is an end to discrimination and to promote gender equality.

By signing and ratifying CEDAW the South African government agreed to introduce measures to help protect the basic rights of women and to improve the status of women by eliminating gender-based discrimination (both direct and indirect). CEDAW identifies many specific areas where there have been wide-spread discrimination against women, for example, with regard to political rights, employment, marriage and the family.

CEDAW is a product of the United Nations Decade of Women (1976- 1985), and is premised on the realisation that there is a need for legal and actual equality between men and women, without which there can be no sustainable development.

CEDAW requires recognition of the important economic and social contribution of women to the family and to society as a whole. It emphasises that discrimination against women will restrict economic development. It also prioritises the need for a change in attitudes, through the education of both men and women to accept equal rights and responsibilities and to overcome prejudices and practices based on stereotyped roles.

The terms of ratifying and signing CEDAW require countries to report every four years to the United Nations. South Africa submitted its first progress report to the United Nations CEDAW Committee in 1997 and presented the report in June 1998.

The Beijing Platform for Action

The Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA), which was adopted at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, is a comprehensive plan of action to enhance the social, economic and political empowerment of women, and it is premised on the need for the sharing of power and responsibility in the home, workplace and in wider society.

The BPFA calls for the integration of gender perspectives in all policies and programmes and focuses on concrete measures to address critical areas such as poverty and the economy, human rights, peace, violence against women, people centred sustainable development, health, and the equitable sharing of family responsibilities.

The BPFA links strategic objectives to actions to be taken by Government, the private sector, the mass media, NGO's and international bodies.

Framework of the Report

The South African Government committed itself to both CEDAW and the BPFA. In South Africa, the majority of the poorest, the homeless, the landless, the unemployed, the lowest paid workers and the violated are women. In addition women also often carry the burden of care for the young, the old, the sick and the disabled. It is the improvement in the quality of life and status of these women that guides the Committee's monitoring of Government's implementation of CEDAW and the BPFA.

In February 1996, Government Departments tabled their commitments to the BPFA. The Committee used these commitments, together with CEDAW and BPFA, in evaluating the progress made by Government to improving the quality of life and status of women.

Other important guiding markers are the 1994 Women's Charter in which the women of South Africa reflected their needs, demands and expectations of a democratic South Africa; the commitment given in the Constitution; and the development of the RDP draft Women's National Empowerment policy (WNEP) which is the basis of government's draft gender policy framework.

This report scrutinises every government department in the period 1994 to date. It examines the issues which women face in the various sectors, the state's obligations in terms of CEDAW, the BPFA and the constitution, the stated aim of each department, the budget it is allocated, relevant policy and legislation that it has processed and the extent to which it has transformed itself, for example in relation to representivity at different levels.

The report is limited in its scope. It does not assess the actual implementation and impact of government's policies on women. The Committee is aware that the report does not present the "full picture" of government's implementation of CEDAW and the BPFA.

In order to accurately reflect the impact of policies it is necessary to develop targets and indicators of gender equality and performance review mechanisms. These tools of analysis are still being developed in the various gender policies and the draft national gender policy framework. The Committee has called on government through the Finance ministry to measure the impact of government's policies, including its macroeconomic policies, on poor women. Such an assessment (of the impact of laws and policies on the lives of women) needs to form a critical part of government's work towards its next CEDAW report to the United Nations.

In the absence of such impact studies (which the Committee obviously does not have the resources to conduct) the Committee drew primarily on the documents of government in compiling the report. The documents drawn from are white papers, legislation, the budget review, the budget white book, and the various CEDAW reports. The Committee also drew on the joint initiative that it is involved in with NGO's around the budget; the Women's Budget Initiative.

A further resource was progress reports submitted to the Committee by different departments. At the end of 1997, the Committee had sent letters to various departments arising out of the Committee's work in that year, requesting progress reports.

Evaluation

The analysis contained in this report shows clearly that there are some ministries which are sincerely committed to improving the lives of the poorest and others which are not. The work of Departments such as land, water and health have begun to build gender into their work every step of the way.

This year has also seen a gender analysis being integrated for the first time into the national budget review released by the Finance Ministry; in areas such as land, water, housing, SMME's, public works, health , public service and welfare. The CSS has begun to develop disaggregated data as seen in their publications on Employment and "Men and Women in South Africa."

Ministries have established different mechanisms within their departments such as gender desks to assist in developing their policies and programmes. The measure of success or failure is not simply the structure itself but whether the work of the department has significantly changed to impact on women.

The challenge to transform society to improve the quality of life and status of women is not compartmentalised but requires a coherent, co-ordinated approach (between departments and different levels of government) in terms of programmes and priorities to which are allocated sufficient human and material resources. In scrutinising government's work since 1994 it is clear that this has begun to happen (for example in terms of the inter-ministerial work on violence against women) but needs to be far more widespread and directed so as to have an impact on the lives of the poor, especially women.

In relation to the budget one of the key government commitments to the BPFA in 1996 was to decrease and reallocate military expenditure to support women's economic advancement. At present South Africa is finalising an agreement of R30 billion in relation to defence when the defence white paper itself notes that the major threats crippling our nascent democracy are poverty and crime and not an outside threat to the Republic. This is just one glaring example of the reprioritisation that needs to happen within and across departments.

Another important challenge is to ensure that women are not seen as simply another special interest group. The majority of those at the very bottom of each of the special interest groups usually cited, for example the disabled and the youth, are overwhelmingly female. A gender analysis (located in the realities of the class, race, cultural, rural, urban and language divides) provides this government with a valuable opportunity to effectively transform from the bottom up. In this regard the National Gender Policy Framework is long overdue and must be finalised to serve its purpose.

The Committee notes that to date there have been numerous problems with implementation of government's policies and legislation. The reports arising out of the Speak Out on Poverty Hearings, hosted by the South African NGO Coalition reflect some of the gaps between "laws and policies and people's lived realities."

There are common themes which emerged from the hearings. Participants indicated that there is a general lack of information amongst the poor about government policies. Many people are unaware of the various grants that have been introduced in areas such as housing, welfare and land.

Procedures for gaining access to subsidies, grants and land restitution applications are complex, time consuming and bureaucratic. Participants indicated that state bureaucracies remain inefficient, obstructionist and unhelpful and that the government forms required are unnecessarily long and complicated when they could be clear and simple. The Government Communications and Information Services clearly has its work cut out for it in ensuring that people are informed what rights they now have under the constitution and the new laws.

In sectors such as land, legislation has been introduced which provides remedies against, for example, eviction, but a lack of affordable legal services results in few being able to utilise the remedies.

In scrutinising each department the overall impression is that critical policy and legislative changes have been made. The present and future challenge is to ensure that through effective implementation, the quality of life and status of women is improved.

Conclusion

The Committee benefited significantly from being assigned a full time researcher, Coriaan de Villiers, to work with us this year and who assisted the Committee with this report. The Committee's committed membership, interaction with other parliamentary committees, with ministries and with civil society assisted the Committee in fulfilling its mandate in relation to CEDAW and the BPFA.

We hope that parliament utilises this report in its role of monitoring government and evaluating whether it is achieving two interlinked priorities - poverty eradication and gender equality.

Pregs Govender
Chair: Joint Standing Committee on the Improvement of the Quality of Life and Status of Women.