Extract from a message to opening plenary of the 2001 conference by Mrs Graça Machel
....My continent Africa has many widows, of all ages, in all conditions and degrees of poverty, isolation and need. In my own country Mozambique, the civil war left a legacy of hundreds and thousands of widows and fatherless children. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has devastated family life across the continent leaving uncountable numbers of orphans and placing an additional burden on older women, many of them widows, who have to take on the care of sick and dying children and grandchildren in need.
These brave and resilient women symbolise a situation which cuts across culture, religion and nationality.
CEDAW Update - Publication
:A new publication on CEDAW: Restoring Rights to Women is now available. It has been published by Partners for Law and Development (PLD), based in New Delhi , and UNIFEM. Copies are available (both single and bulk orders) from:
Partners for Law in Development
F-18, First Floor,
Jangpura Extension
New Delhi –110014
Tel. No.-24316832/33 Email: [email protected]
CEDAW Update - South Africa
One of our partners, Lesley-Ann Foster of Masimanyane Women’s Support Centre, Eastern Cape has very kindly sent us some information about how she, with various South African groups, prepared a Shadow Report on violence against women for CEDAW. Below is an abbreviated account of the process used which may interest those of our readers who are thinking about preparing a Shadow Report on widows.
Developing the Shadow Report.
A small group of women of like minded women who had worked together before and trusted each other and share similar ideological underpinnings to their work were invited to participate in the development of the South African NGO shadow report. The group was also culturally diverse and brought together a range of skills and expertise.
IWRAW has a set of guidelines for developing a shadow report; this was the only document available to help shape the process. We started by sharing ideas of how we should proceed and then the discussion deepened into an analysis of violence against women in South Africa . We all agreed that violence against women and girls encompasses many other facets of women’s rights: education, employment, literacy, health, welfare, etc all had links to violence against women.
Writing the report
The next step was to discuss our approach to writing a report on violence against women. We made an audit of the group’s skills and found we had medical and legal expertise, media, education, financial, advocacy and lobbying skills. Most of the group also had strong links to other networks. We discussed which aspects of violence against women each member of the group could contribute to and then grouped ourselves by province. Everyone agreed to coordinate a broader discussion in their respective province. Each participant was asked to make a commitment to this process and to taking the information to networks in their areas.
Division of labour
Each participant then undertook to research the topic they had agreed to work on and to identify and coordinate women’s groups who could contribute to the topic. Each participant was asked to read the government report and comment on it from her own perspective and experiences but keeping in mind the relevance to the shadow report being developed.
It was agreed that the group should meet every six weeks as we only had six months to the actual reporting time. When we got together again most groups had worked hard and produced good information. But some had not done the required work, which caused obvious problems; however after discussion it was agreed to give an extension to those who had not completed the work.
Once all the reports were in, two people from Masimanyane Women’s Support Centre (the coordinating organization) began to edit them and integrate them into one report. We also gathered further information, research reports and relevant documents through our links with groups outside of the CEDAW Task Team.
We would be interested to hear from any readers who know of other NGOs who have produced alternative or shadow reports to CEDAW on the topic of discrimination against widows.