Source: Independent Online
A campaign aimed at refocusing the developmental agenda so that women and girls take centre stage was launched at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Africa in Cape Town on Thursday.

The Poverty Is Sexist campaign, led by international advocacy organisation ONE, called on the African Union (AU) to develop a strong declaration on women and girls when its meets in Johannesburg next week.

“This is the AU’s year on women empowerment. You cannot have a better approach than to refocus the global agenda on women and children. The barriers are essentially structural... We need to speak to policies that will bring change,” Dr Sipho Moyo, the Africa director for ONE, told reporters.

The campaign is backed by a number of high-level officials such as the African Development Bank’s special envoy on gender, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, South African jazz singer Judith Sephuma, and Nigerian actress, singer and philanthropist Jalade Ekeinde.

“I joined this campaign because women need help. From the minute a girl child is born, she is already at a disadvantage. We are marginalised... Women have to deal with many issues, but we have few women to speak to them. It is double jeopardy,” Moyo said.

A booklet on the campaign released at WEF calls for better targeted investments in health, education and the economic empowerment of women and girls to dismantle the barriers that prevent them from living healthy and productive lives.

One of the grimmest statistics highlighted by the campaign was that a woman in Sierra Leone was 183 times more likely to die during childbirth than a woman in Switzerland. Nearly 45 percent of the world’s maternal deaths occurred amongst 13 percent of the world’s poorest women.

Madagascar had 114 times more out-of-school girls than Germany, which had a population that was 3.5 times bigger than Madagascar, while in France, 97 percent of women had a bank account, but in Chad it was seven percent.

The booklet said that by providing female farmers with the same access to productive resources as their male counterparts globally, the number of people living in chronic hunger could be reduced by between 100 to 150 million.

Also if there was a reduction in the employment gap between men and women by 2017, there could be an additional $1.6-trillion in global output.

While these figures were available, the booklet said more and better data was vital if women were to be at the centre of the development story.

“The data gaps for girls and women reflect an overall dearth of comprehensive data and statistics available for poverty analysis, and we need a data revolution to address the problem across the board,” read the booklet.

Campaigners are calling for a deeper look at agriculture, health, energy, education, access to technology, and financial, legal and economic empowerment.

It believed that 2015 was the year for the globe to refocus on women and girls due to a number of conferences that were happening on women this year by the AU and the G7.

Also, the United Nations was deciding on its new set of sustainable development goals in September which the campaign hoped to influence.