Educate a woman and you educate a nation!

As the world commemorates International Women’s Day on 8 March, Southern Africa HIV and AIDS Information Service (SAfAIDS), is calling upon stakeholders to invest in the empowerment of girls and women throughout southern Africa and beyond.

This year on International Women’s Day, SAfAIDS adds its voice to the growing voices of those calling for “Investing in Women and Girls.” It is important however, to ask ourselves what we are talking about when we talk of investing in women and girls. Do we mean giving women’s organizations funding to embark on the empowerment of women, do we mean giving ordinary women money to buy two or three chickens so they can be able to feed their families?

For us as an AIDS Service Organisation that has noted a decline in the resources going to women due to competition from other programmes: like circumcision, treatment, arms and equipment, among others, we worry that women will not access both treatment and prevention services unless they are empowered.
That is why investing in women and girls should start at the very beginning; where we make sure that girls in southern Africa and beyond have access to education, so that they can be empowered for life. It should not only be about big projects that will ensure that women can not only feed their families, but about supporting women to reach and occupy leadership positions in business and in the community. When a woman is thus empowered, it follows that her children will be too and that way the future can only be brighter.

Today women across Africa are suffering from an inferiority complex, which comes from years and years of being told that a woman is not good enough, years of cultures and beliefs that perpetuate the subjugation of women at the expense of their health and development. Gender based violence continues to be a major killer of women across the region and most of it is perpetuated under the guise of culture and tradition. Multiple concurrent partnerships continue to happen and women bear the brunt of this as evidenced by the higher numbers of women living with HIV compared to their male counterparts in Sub-Saharan Africa at 65 percent.

Today as we celebrate womanhood, SAfAIDS notes that women are not accessing treatment at the same levels as their male counterparts; it notes that women are still unable to negotiate for safer sex and have no power over their reproductive health and rights. We note today that today testing positive for HIV earns a woman ridicule, and can even lead to the breakdown of her family.
There is need to empower women so that they can begin to challenge the status quo, they can begin to challenge culture and tradition that has ingrained in them this belief that they should not speak out even if they are being violated. As an organization we have in the last two years been looking at the linkage between culture, women’s rights and HIV and AIDS. We believe that if you leave out culture, you are missing part of the equation because today even women of good economic standing, go back into their homes and see cultural values and norms that are against their basic human rights but cannot do anything about it.

As we invest in women and girls, we need to go back to our cultural values like forced virginity testing, polygamy, wife inheritance and the belief that a woman is not good enough unless if she is married and has children and address them. Gender Based Violence is not and has never been part of our culture.
If we address this, we can then begin to talk about women being celebrated as equal beings. We can begin to build ordinary women into leaders and we can begin to support those of women already in leadership positions so that they can work for the empowerment of all women across the divide.

It is important to note this year that as women we have come a long way in terms of legislation and policy, looking at the Domestic Violence Act in Zimbabwe and protection for women in South Africa, Mozambique, among others and the emergence of women in top political positions in the region as evidenced by the vice presidents in Zimbabwe and South Africa and the Mozambican prime minister. Let us make sure that all these strides work for the advancement and promotion of women’s causes.
Let us take this occasion as opportunity to re-energise and gear for the work that still awaits us. The fight is not over until all our women can prevent themselves from HIV infection, until those women living with HIV and AIDS can access treatment, care and support systems. Today I say to all women and girls out there, that no matter the circumstances, never give up hope, change is possible, it is up to you and me to reach for the stars and be who we want to be.