Lobby calls for gender responsive trade policies
African Women’s Development and Communication Network Executive Director Memory Kachambwa. She says women need to be dignified and the trading system must see women as equal players.
What you need to know:
- Femnet has singled out harassment, gender-based violence and gender discrimination as some of the factors preventing women from adequately engaging in business.
- It said the setbacks are negating efforts by the African Union (AU) to achieve the intended benefits of the African Continental Free Trade Area.
A Pan-African feminist lobby has singled out gender-based violence and discrimination as some of the factors preventing women from adequately engaging in business.
The African Women's Development and Communications Network (Femnet) said the setbacks are negating efforts by the African Union (AU) to achieve the intended benefits of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AFCTA).
It challenged governments to end all forms of abuses against women in cross-border trading such as theft of goods and cash, sexual harassment, and verbal abuse. The remarks were made at the ongoing Gender Is My Agenda Campaign in Addis Ababa ahead of the AU Heads of State Summit.
They complained that government officials manning borders view small-scale women traders as sex tools, something they must seize forthwith.
“When we talk about women’s roles in the AFCTA space, can we truly say women have the same rights, access and capacity as their male counterparts? Women need to be dignified and the trading system must see women as equal players,” said Memory Kachambwa, Femnet executive director.
Removal of non-tariff barriers, creation of financial policies responsive to women and linkage between trade, peace, and security in fragile states rank highly among the demands by the group that the heads of state must address as they meet in Addis Ababa to discuss AFCTA.
“We must address all the trade barriers to realise the change that we have been demanding for so long. Our words are not just mere sentiments for people to react to whenever it is convenient,” said Ms Kachamba.
The group appealed to the continent’s trading systems to treat women as equal players and make them have the same rights, access and capacity as their male counterparts. They noted that even though a significant number of African leaders have discouraged gender-based trade-related violence, this has, however, not lessened the vices against women, especially in some remote regions where customary norms often carry as much weight as constitutional laws.
The group regretted that where government laws appear strong, operatives devise ways to beat their own system. They singled out the South Sudan-Sudan border, a range of actors, including border and customs officials, gangs working on behalf of the state or independently, smugglers, transport workers, and male traders jointly or separately perpetrate violence against women traders.
A participant from the South Sudan Women’s Coalition said governments must end harassment of women traders and human trafficking.
Mercy Nnanna from Nigeria questioned the extent to which free trade area will affect the grassroots, particularly women, who constitute Africa’s largest agricultural producers but are neither aware of nor prepared for the cross-border free trade pact.
According to Nnanna, for the AU to successfully accelerate the free trade pact, individual governments must first educate their citizens on what it entails. The free trade pact, she said, means governments must increase investment in agriculture, or else locals will lose out to foreign investors.
“Governments must develop policies that protect women businesses and level the ground for small scale traders,” she said.
Malado Kaba from the African Development Bank (AfDB) noted women do not only make 70 per cent of food producers across Africa but also dominate informal trade across borders. She cited the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region where informal trade contributes to 30-40 per cent of the countries’ GDP, with women controlling 70 per cent of that informal trade.
Kaba revealed the AfDB has set up Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (Afawa), a Pan-African initiative, to bridge the $42 billion financing gap facing women in Africa.
“The Afawa initiative is born from the realisation that women are the backbone of the African economy and have grown to make the continent as one with the highest percentage of women entrepreneurs in the world,” Kaba said.
She, however, called for the AfCFTA to create synergy with other institutions and regulations to reduce gender inequalities.
Dr Nancy Gitonga, the CEO of Zamora Consulting, a regional company supporting greater inclusion of women in trade regional programmes, said the AFCFTA should work to harmonise quality standards so that women can trade across borders without being stopped because of differences in standards.
Maria Andrea Echaz from the UN Human Rights Office said inclusion of women and girls in the AFCFTA processes must be central. She said the role of women who make up the majority of the informal economy, agriculture, and cross- border trade in Africa remain overlooked.
“Worse, most economic policies are drafted in gender neutral language, which ignores the differentiated impact of policies on women,” said Echaz, urging policymakers to gather and dis-aggregate data by gender and analyse the impact.
The AfCFTA is designed to boost intra-African trade by up to 52.3 per cent and is expected to expand Africa’s economy to $29 trillion by 2050.
Informal and cross-border trade accounts for 70 per cent of the economy in sub-Saharan Africa, and is a source of income for 43 per cent of Africa’s population. Women in Africa constitute 70 per cent of the informal cross-border traders.
However, according to Lina Asimwe from the Eastern African Sub-Regional Support Initiative (EASSI), two scenarios confront the AfCFTA, borders of stable nations where women trade with ease and those that are problematic and characterised by abrupt closures, gun-trotting armed groups and untrained customs officials.
“Women at unstable borders often seek alternative routes to ply their trade at the risk of abuse, sexual harassment and violence. When such incidents happen, it becomes hard to track and take legal actions against perpetrators since most tend to be militias of vigilantes armed to cater for the interest of warlords in control of these borders,” she said.
Asimwe challenged the AU heads to consider peace, reconciliation and justice as key components that would facilitate the free movement of trade, as they remain a constraint to women traders across borders.
A legal advisor at the UN, Liz Guantai, noted that women need information on rules, which tend to differ from one country to the other, procedures, as well as taxi regimes.
