EmPOWER Her

Empowering women is key to building the future that we all want to see

The struggle to affirm women’s identities while at the same time doing all they can to transform societal, cultural or traditional notions or perceptions of their gender role has been at the crux of the feminist revolution worldwide. Well, there are visible signs of immense progress being made in this light. However, empowering women to stand up for their own rights has remained a challenge in most African societies.

But this question arises: How much has been achieved in facilitating increased women’s access to legal, social and economic justice? Numerous issues still exist in these aspects of life, despite many successes achieved in empowering women. For instance, as we all know, considering their continuing commitment to hard work in the area of agriculture, one may safely conclude that women often work more than men. Yet, they are less paid.

Gender discrimination affects women and girls throughout their lifetime

Studies have revealed that women produce more than 80 per cent of the food in Africa, yet they own only one per cent of the land. Die-hard African traditions also forbid the woman from inheriting portion of the land owned by her father. The notion is that the girl child is meant to leave the home when married. However, the boy child is assumed to be the caretaker of the home when the father is dead and gone. When widowed or divorced, women often face discrimination when accessing the land of either their husband or the father in cases where they have to return to father’s home following the death of their husbands.

Gender discrimination affects girls and women throughout their lifetime and subjects them to abject poverty. To reverse these disparities and forge new social relations, women’s right advocates must focus their works more on improving women's access to and control over the land to enhance food and nutrition security, and further lessen widespread poverty facing women. In this way, women’s role and voices would be strengthened in having a say in the home and elsewhere.