Mandisa Mbali,
"Women in South African AIDS Activism:
Towards a Feminist Economic and Political Agenda to Address the Epidemic"
(page 5 of 8)
3) Economy policy and women's rights
Violence against women is a key social driver of new H.I.V infections
in South Africa. In turn, women's relative poverty is a factor that
forces them to stay in relationships with violent and controlling men.
The high cost of antiretroviral treatment limits access to it, thereby
contributing to the extent to which AIDS is a major cause of death among
women and increasing women's disproportionate burden of care. I argue in
this section that a women's-rights agenda around AIDS must include steps
to advance the goal of women's equality to men in the economic sphere.
In addition to challenging barriers to universal access to treatment,
AIDS activist organizations should advocate for specific government
measures to address women's relative economic marginalization. Moreover,
at the very least, civil society organizations should not perpetuate
women's economic disempowerment through exploiting their unpaid domestic
and care-based labor based upon the myth that they are "naturally"
better suited to such work.
The feminist economists Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson have noted
that "men have dominated the community of scholars who have created the
discipline" and that "certain activities that are historically of
greater concern to women than men have all too frequently been
neglected" (Ferber and Nelson 1993: 2). Similarly, women's needs and
interests globally are often poorly represented in national governments'
budgets. In post-apartheid South Africa, feminists in government and
civil society have made various attempts to shape the budget to advance
women's interests.
Perhaps the best documented of these was the Women's Budget
Initiative (WBI), which was established in 1995 by two non-governmental
organizations and Parliament's Committee on the Quality of Life and
Status of Women (Govender, 2007). Pregs Govender, a member of Parliament
who chaired the Committee on the Status of Women, and Debbie Budlender,
a feminist economist and sociologist, were key to the establishment of
the WBI (Govender 2007; Budlender 2004). The WBI analyzed the budgets of
every national department, and of provincial and local governments, from
a gender perspective (Govender 2007: 165). Budlender has argued that the
work of the WBI was initially well received, because the Minister of
Finance announced in his first budget speech that there was to be a
reduction in the defence budget in favour of increased spending on
"women and children" (2004: 9). However, both Budlender and Govender
have linked the diminishing commitment to advancing gender equality
through the budget to the adoption of the fiscally conservative Growth,
Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy in 1996 (Budlender 2004;
Govender 2007). While the strategy has proved highly effective at
reducing the deficit, in the absence of improvements to the educational
system, the government has failed to meet its targets on increasing
employment or redistributing wealth (Nattrass 2003). Indeed, in recent
years, job shedding linked to tariff reductions has proven particularly
disastrous in industries where most of the employees are female, such as
clothing and textile production (Benjamin 2007: 190). Moreover, as
Govender pointed out at the time, an ambitious rearmament program,
launched in 1998, failed to address poor women's economic needs
(Govender 2007). Govender later resigned from Parliament in protest of
Thabo Mbeki's policies, showing that both Parliament and the political
parties are forums where outspoken feminists are made to feel unwelcome
(Govender 2007).
Government approaches to addressing the feminization of poverty are
relevant to the country's H.I.V. epidemic because gender-based social
drivers of new infections such as transactional sex (Hunter 2002) and
violence against women (Pronyk 2006) are clearly related to high levels
of female unemployment. A randomized controlled trial in rural Limpopo
showed that there was a 55 percent reduction in the levels of physical
and sexual abuse experienced by women who had participated for a year in
a joint microfinance, gender and H.I.V. training program (Pronyk 2006).
The expansion of such microfinance initiatives has not been taken up in
public policy, or by potentially vocal advocates such as the large AIDS
activist organizations or COSATU.
What has been promoted consistently across the ideological spectrum
of civil society—from the center-right Democratic Alliance party (the
official opposition), TAC, COSATU, the South African Council of Churches
(SACC) and the South African NGO Coalition—is the introduction of a
basic income grant (BIG) for all South Africans. The thinking is that
with an increase in income tax for the top two tax quintiles and/or an
increase in "sin taxes" on alcohol and cigarettes, a grant of 100 rand
(approximately $12) could be provided every month to all South Africans,
irrespective of their income (Nattrass 2003: 151). Wealthier South
Africans would pay more in additional taxes than they would receive
through the grant, while their poorer counterparts would benefit because
of the greater bureaucratic efficiencies inherent in the universal
provision of social security. In addition, Natrass has argued that in
the short to medium term, this measure represents one of the few
mechanisms to substantially address income inequality in South Africa
(2003). As we have seen, women are overrepresented in the ranks of the
unemployed in South Africa, and so any universal social security
provision would certainly improve their livelihoods.
The Mbeki administration was resistant to calls to introduce a BIG
owing to its fiscally conservative GEAR policy framework. At the time of
writing, it remains to be seen whether the ANC's 2009 election manifesto
promise to "work towards bolder expansion of unemployment insurance"
will be implemented, and if so, in what guise (ANC 2009; Piliso 2009).
More importantly, it remains to be seen whether it will be as universal
as the BIG proposal, or will include the expense and bureaucratic
inefficiencies that are associated with means-tested social security
provision.
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