Source: the Monitor
Millennium Development Goal Three of the UN has put 2015 as deadline to eliminate gender inequality and empower women at all levels including education, health, employment, equal opportunity and dignity among others.

Reports show that many African countries are still far from meeting the target. The United Nations Women representative to the African Union, Ms Florence Butegwa, spoke to Thoughts&Ideas on the progress made and bottlenecks met by the body achieving this goal.

1. Are you happy with the progress so far taken by different African countries in achieving women's rights?
It is true that African countries are making progress mainly in terms of developing policies and changing some laws. You will recall that in November 2009, during the 15-year review of the Beijing platform for Action, there was a continent-wide review by governments in terms of what they have done so far. Clearly there is progress almost in all the countries. Most have gender policies or some kind of national women machinery like ministry of Gender or ministry of Women Affairs. There are aspects of gender equality in the constitution and some have passed other laws on different aspects of women's rights.
What came out clearly was that the progress in enacting laws and setting up national machinery has not been followed up by implementation. So even if gender equality is guaranteed in the constitution, in practice there is discrimination in all the countries. There are areas where progress is really low particularly in areas concerning the right to health. When you look at statistics of maternal mortality, many African countries are still showing more than 600 women dying out of every 100,000 births due to preventable causes.

2.So, what next for the UN if countries are not implementing the laws in place?
The different UN agencies are there to support governments. The first thing is for national governments to include more women priority areas in their development plan. If a country should set up a poverty reduction strategy or growth strategy which is its framework for development planning and budgeting process, it also becomes the framework for cooperation with other development partners .
The UN finds itself in a situation where the government is not giving priority to these areas and yet we are required to support government basing on its defined priority areas in which case the role of the UN becomes one of advocacy so that in government's priority there is a gender aspect. For example, in Northern Uganda, the focus is on rehabilitating the region, even if gender was not specifically stated, there are gender aspects like supporting trauma victims, violence and peace building efforts.

3.In many African communities issues of land grabbing and denial of widows to own property stand out despite existent laws. What is your take on this and what would your office do if it were to intervene?
While there is reduction in cases of property and land grabbing, there are continued problems because in most cases the property is taken when the woman is in a situation of distress, when the husband has just died and she is not thinking of property.
The practical difficulty happening here is that the law is adversarial meaning a person has to sue somebody to be able to get redress. The justice system is really slow. A case may take six to seven years. That discourages many women to peruse the case and a lot of money may be required which a woman may not have. Women lawyers associations try to help to address the issue but they are limited by resources so they reach fewer women while many governments have not set up public legal aid systems which would ease legal redress.
I think each government under different stakeholders really needs to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the mechanism they have.

4.Are there deliberate efforts by the UN to bring down maternal mortality in Africa?
The starting point is that the primary responsibility is with governments to allocate enough resources for maternal health directly not as a whole to the ministry because allocating the budget to the ministry of health does not guarantee that the money shall go direct for maternal health. You find that a high proportion of that goes into salaries. So the government needs to ensure that the targeted funding goes actually to improving the health centres, equipping them with the necessary staff, materials and medicine. We need to see government invest a little more in these areas.
There is also need for public information by local governments and non- government organisations to bring information to mothers on how to have safe births.
In 2009 the African Union launched a campaign for accelerated reduction of maternal death which more than 30 countries have adopted; one of the commitments in July is to increase health budgets to 10 per cent of the national budget to health and moving towards 15 per cent. I am not sure Uganda has signed but in July 2010 the heads of state convened in Kampala and received a report on progress and there are very clear steps they agreed to take. UN through its bodies like WHO, UNFPA, UNICEF, UN Women is really to support government in those efforts.

5.How about rights of women in war-torn countries? We have got several reports of women raped and abused in northern Uganda and DR Congo but only the indicted rebels are being perused. What is your office doing to ensure there is justice?
You may be aware that there is national progress in negotiations and consultations with the leadership about issues of northern Uganda. There was a call by northern Uganda leaders to use the traditional method of conflict resolution. There are already organisations working with women in northern Uganda to see that women get the justice they want to see.

6.The traditional system sidelines women from representing themselves in the local courts
I am not very familiar with the details of the traditional system but definitely the consultations have to deal with that and as media you can highlight these things and raise questions.

7.What is your take on critics that gender equality is pushing women with gloves and how far do you want women to go?
There can never be a situation of pushing women too much. The work we do is to see that men and women have equal rights. Part of these rights are to enable women live at their optimum level and achieve in terms of work, health, education, happiness and dignity. It means if you have a girl she should have an equal opportunity as the boy child and even when she gets married she chooses the man she wants and should be able to make decisions in the family. And it should continue like that even when the spouse dies. Her property should be legally protected. It is a progressive achievement that cannot be accomplished in one day.