This year’s Women’s Day comes in the year the global community is marking Beijing’s silver jubilee. Because of its defining nature, it is easy for the younger generation, especially, to forget that before Beijing were other meetings which contributed immensely to the women’s empowerment agenda.
For us in Kenya, the 1985 UN Decade for Women Conference was as important as Beijing was to be to the global community. It was the first time that so many women — estimated at 12,000 — converged on Nairobi. Officially the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the UN Decade for Women, the meeting sought to establish concrete measures to overcome obstacles to achieving the decade’s goals.
That Kenya came third and only after the World Conference on the UN Decade for Women in Copenhagen, Denmark, testifies to the country’s leadership in matters women. Equally important, remember that the first such conference was in Mexico in 1975.
While Copenhagen zeroed in on employment, health and education, Nairobi, with its Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women, formed the basis of the much-vaunted Beijing conference.
A lot has happened since Nairobi 1985, which laid the ground for appointing women to full ministerial posts.
Nairobi 1985 opened Kenyan women’s eyes to what was happening elsewhere. It was untenable that a man should lead a delegation to a women’s conference 10 years after Nairobi. That is how President Daniel arap Moi, who until then had only had an assistant minister Julia Ojiambo, appointed by First President Jomo Kenyatta. Sheer pressure in the 1990s forced Moi to appoint Winfred Nyiva Mwendwa, then Kitui West MP, to the Cabinet.
Six Cabinet secretaries — Prof Margaret Kobia, Raychelle Omamo, Dr Monica Juma, Sicily Kariuki, Amina Mohamed and Farida Karoney — sit in President Uhuru Kenyatta’s government; a 600 per cent improvement since Beijing.
They owe their positions to the eye-opening global conferences that saw activists champion entrenchment of gender equity in the 2010 Constitution. Yet much more need to be done in regard to women’s representation in political governance, where achieving the constitutional two-thirds gender rule remains a poser.
Even worse is violence against women, which calls for radical transformation of the mind and spirit of men and women if all are to realise their full dignity.
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