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Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 4
(6 of 20 pages)
Another issue I think is a good experience, is women's budgets. This experience
started in South Africa. It was a book written by South Africans and we decided as Mozambicans to initiate some
action in a seminar. It does not mean a budget program for women, but mainly to balance the budget for women and
men in all programs.
Legislation. Although in our constitution women and men are equal, it is expected that man is the head of the family.
There are some laws still discriminatory to women and what we have done is two months ago we organized a group
of feminist activists and lawyers to analyze all this discriminatory legislation in order to lobby and influence
parliament to reform them. The main issues are the code of family, the emeritus law, the commercial law, dependent
to man marriage, which in our region is a very acute problem and we have also the program for [Inaudible].
In conclusion, although we have some gains, the women's struggle is continuing with the activities I mentioned.
The political world is dominated by the male, but there is a strong commitment to change the subordination of women
in reality. We saw it in the first day in all speakers, every speaker raised the issues of women and if you go
deeper, from talking to the practical work is a gap and we have to think about that.
Thank you.
Chair: Thank you very much, Madame da Silva. I heard some very practical examples of successes and things
that we should consider. One is quotas - we can have quite a discussion on that. If there are any Americans here
in the room, we can tell you about quotas. Two is gender training - a very, very good idea; working with NGOs,
the media - the media in particular being very important, because that's the voice to affect public opinion; the
women's network, civic education programs, bringing it to the new generation, to the schools and the children,
using different methodology like songs and dance is very creative, and legislation and how that it important to
go in and analyze and make amendments to that legislation that is discriminatory.
I would like to introduce our next distinguished speaker, Madame Amal Aleem Al Souswa. She has occupied many positions
in government and I'm sorry that I cannot list them all because really she is a role model here for women in Yemen,
as well as in the Arab world. In 1997 she was Deputy Minister of Information and as of May, 1999, very recently
and congratulations, she is Ambassador in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She has participated in a number of
conferences on women, human rights and development. She is also well published with many studies on women and development
issues in Yemen. Welcome and thank you.
Madame Amal Aleem Al Souswa: Thank you very much, Madame Chairwoman. I would like to say one small sentence
before I start presenting my paper and that is that in women, democracy and unity came together, so we cannot really
talk about one aspect without talking about the other, so I'm going to concentrate on that experience, the new
experience, maybe the baby experience since 1990 only and I'm not going to talk about the other background so that
we can talk about both south and north emerging together in the unified Yemen. I would like as well to say half
of the population in Yemen is women and this is something that everybody knows maybe in most of the countries,
but this half of the population in Yemen is not as qualified as the other half when it comes to education, to economic
empowerment, when it comes to the public place occupation, and to other things alike, of course. And we are suffering,
as a matter of fact, in Yemen from a very important and a very difficult problem, that is related to the illiteracy
amongst women, which is maybe the highest in the Arab region. In addition to that, of course, you have what you
would find in the whole Arabian peninsular and the Gulf as well, the work and also the expectation from the women
to play a certain role and not the other. It has been only very recently in Yemen, maybe you can start from the
constitution in the early '60s, when both North and Yemen had their republican systems, were stating that men and
women are equal in rights and duties. But of course realities are something else. We were always saying that it
is the culture and the society, it is the practices of the people and their acceptance of those principles that
make us a little bit lagging behind the men.
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