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.
