During his opening statement to the all-day panel dedicated to women and human rights, Mr. Türk said there had been “extraordinary progress” thanks to the worldwide women’s movement.

But the very fact that a separate panel needed to be convened on gender-based violence shows that progress has been “hard-won and fragile,” he added.

The June 28 meeting’s focus on so-called economic violence as a part of a wider pattern of gender-based violence occurs when a woman or girl is denied access to financial resources as a form of abuse or control.

Mr. Türk noted that one in three women have been subjected to some form of violence—physical, sexual, psychological or economic—at least once in their life.

“If one in three men globally were subject to such devastating and pervasive harm, an emergency summit would be convened,” he said.

Unseen, unregulated

The High Commissioner said economic violence often goes unseen or unregulated but could be just as harmful as physical violence, as it usually includes forms of control, exploitation and sabotage.

“While economic violence most commonly occurred in the home, it could also be enabled and perpetrated by the state through discriminatory legal frameworks which restricted women’s access to credit, employment, social protection, or property and land rights,” he said.

Mr. Türk declared that so far, global efforts to deliver on gender equality have failed, pointing out that 3.9 billion women worldwide faced legal barriers affecting their economic participation, and women earn only 77 cents for every dollar paid to men, among other inequities.

Time to start over

Mr. Türk said there needed to be a thorough revision of discriminatory laws and practices to put a stop to economic violence.

“Gender equality needed to be positively fostered through laws governing all areas of life and there needed to be policy measures to ensure these laws were applied,” he said.

Further, he said there needed to be a stronger effort to ensure survivors of economic violence could seek justice and assistance.

“There needed to be better complaint mechanisms, economic and social support systems, more widely available psychological assistance, and for perpetrators to be brought to justice,” the High Commissioner said.

He emphasized that violence against women and girls was “abhorrent and inexcusable.”

Civil society

During the forum, members of civil society also weighed in on the harm caused by economic violence.

Esther Waweru, senior legal advisor at Equality Now, said inequality in the family was one of the main reasons for economic violence, paired with “retrogressive patriarchal gender norms.”

She said that 1.4 billion women globally lived in countries where economic violence was not recognized and where there are no protections; a practice she believes could leave more women and girls vulnerable to exploitation.

Ms. Waweru recommends that member states enact comprehensive laws to criminalize sexual and gender-based violence and intimate partner violence—along with economic violence.

She called for laws to “repeal and revoke marital power clauses designating husbands as the head of the households” to “ensure equitable sharing of the joint property deriving from marriage” and equal labor rights. (UN News)

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Not only are African women in leadership positions but African women are out front championing causes that not only affect women, but they are helping to provide insight into the latest iterations of neo-colonialism on the continent through activism and writing. 

Obianuju Ekeocha, founder and president of Culture of Life Africa, comes to mind. Ekeocha is known for championing pro-life efforts throughout Africa and for pointing out how foreign abortion funding fuels the “ideological colonization” of the continent. Also, in her book, “Target Africa: Ideological Neocolonialism in the 21st Century,” this human rights activist casts insight into the new colonialism and subjects it to critical scrutiny.

Ekeocha’s book is a must-read for complacent Westerners and for those believing their aid money is being put to good use in Africa, wrote David Paton, Chair of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University in the UK. She gives a masterful analysis “demonstrating in painful detail how Western governments, billionaires, and NGOs are systematically imposing a morality completely alien to many Africans,” Ekeocha writes. 

“The fact is,” she writes, “colonialism for the people and peoples of Africa and other places did not really end, or, if it ended, it has been reinstituted. Today’s colonialism lacks the former features of the old colonialism—there are no longer viceroys, governors general, and occupying armies— but is nevertheless a type of colonialism—ideological colonialism.

The economically powerful and culturally dominant nations whose governing ideology is a form of what the late Robert Bellah described as ‘expressive individualism,’ use their hegemonic power to impose on the people of Africa and other developing nations … .” 

Paulina Chiziane was the first woman to publish a novel in Mozambique and became the first African woman to receive the most important award for Portuguese literature, the Camões Prize. She’s also the first to break all the rules about what a writer may reveal about Mozambique’s patriarchal culture and social taboos.

According to conversation.com, she was born in Manjacaze in 1955 and raised in the capital, Maputo. Chiziane’s mother tongue is Chopi, a Bantu language spoken along the southern coast of Mozambique, which she practiced along with Portuguese, the language imposed during the colonial period. Today Chiziane has a degree in linguistics and is a leading global figure in Portuguese literature.

During her acceptance speech in Lisbon, she said, “I was walking without knowing my direction, and yet I arrived somewhere. I come from Africa. I am Black, and I am here, being the first Black woman to receive this high recognition … I am Black. Yes, and so what? If you want to be someone in life, in this world, you need to affirm your space. Leave traces of your feet on the ground, indelibly engraved, for other people to say: here someone has passed.”

Chiziane’s stories often reflect the social instability of a country oppressed by a war of liberation that was followed by civil conflicts after attaining independence from Portugal in 1975. Her writings reflect her commitment to the Frelimo liberation movement.

African women’s history of involvement in liberation movements is sacrosanct. A case in point is Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah’s Egyptian wife, Fathia Halim Ritzk. She was adamant when she told Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, “I would like to go and marry this anti-colonial leader. I read his autobiography, I know of his trials and tribulations, of his struggles … and his spearheading the anti-colonial struggle upon his return to his homeland.”

Add to that, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Dr. Nalendi Pandor and her active involvement in condemning Israel for its massacre of Palestinians in Gaza over the last several weeks. Pandor is one of the principal reasons for South Africa’s recent severing of diplomatic ties with Israel.

And lastly, while Tasneem Hafiz is Palestinian in 2019 she participated in protests during the Sudanese revolution. Hafiz has lived in Sudan for 29 years, nearly all of her life, and has Sudanese family members.

She discussed being Palestinian and growing up in Sudan with 500wordsmag.com. “We both, as nations, share the same values of generosity, kindness and bravery. The only kind of living I have experienced and become accustomed to is in Sudan. Its people are incredibly pleasant, modest, loving and simple with no complications, and hospitable,’ she said.

“I can’t speak about the similarities between Sudan and Palestine without mentioning the shared beliefs of courageously and tirelessly fighting against tyranny and injustice,” she added.

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South Africa’s recent National Women’s Day, which annually pays tribute to all African women, forms part of South Africa’s Women’s Month which provides an opportunity to pay tribute to the generations of women whose struggles laid the foundations for the progress made in empowering women and achieving gender equality.

“The 1956 protest saw members of the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) rally against the apartheid government. The protest was supported by mothers, daughters, sisters and friends who decided enough was enough and came together to initiate change,” according to International Women’s Day organizers.

African women across the continent have a history of revolutionary struggle. According to many published reports, in the West African country of Nigeria, under Great Britain’s colonial rule, there occurred what colonial historians called the “Aba Women’s Riots of 1929,” but it should be termed the Aba Women’s Rebellion. “This was touched off by the imposition of direct (colonial) taxation and the introduction of new local courts and especially of warrant chiefs.”

The roots of the rebellion evolved in 1914, when the first Nigerian colonial governor, Lord Frederick Lugard, instituted the system of indirect rule in Southern Nigeria. Under his plan British colonial administrators would rule locally through “warrant chiefs,” essentially Igbo individuals appointed by the governor.

According to blackpast.org, “In November of 1929, thousands of Igbo women congregated at the Native Administration centers in Calabar and Owerri as well as smaller towns to protest both the warrant chiefs and the taxes on the market women. Using the traditional practice of censoring men through all night song and dance ridicule (often called ‘sitting on a man’), the women chanted and danced, and in some locations forced warrant chiefs to resign their positions.”

Blackpast.org noted that the women also attacked European-owned stores and Barclays Bank and broke into prisons and released prisoners. “They also attacked Native Courts run by colonial officials, burning many of them to the ground. Colonial Police and troops were called in. They fired into the crowds that had gathered at Calabar and Owerri, killing more than 50 women and wounding over 50 others. During the two-month ‘war’ at least 25,000 Igbo women were involved in protests against British officials.”

In Liberia, African women used an organized “sex strike” to end civil war. For more than a decade, Liberia had been struggling to recover from a civil war. The 2008 documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” depicts the extraordinary story of a group of West African women who banded together to end their nation’s second bloody civil war.

Leymah Gbowee, leader of the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, in 2008 told National Public Radio (NPR), “Liberia had been at war for so long.”

“War fatigue, not having anything to lose because you lost everything. Being pushed so far back physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, every way that we had two options. To come to death or fight back. And we decided to fight back. Not in a conventional way of the cowards that we had as warlords, but as heroes and heroines, meaning we used our bodies, put ourselves out there and conquered the evil force.”

Gbowee later added, “Well, I must admit, in the urban area where I operated from, it was a bit difficult because every day we got stories of women coming back and saying, I had no control. But in the rural areas it was really, really successful because the women they had smaller communities, they were able to stay together and be together so they were together for like months at night, keeping vigils, praying together. So they could keep it on for a much longer time. But for us in the urban area, it was quite difficult.”

In 2019 it was the imposing symbol in Northeast Africa of engineering and architecture student, Alaa Sarah, clad in white in Nubian cultural garb and standing atop a car that led demonstrators with poetry in protest against Omar al-Bashir’s near-30-year reign.

She represented the fact that for months, the women of Sudan had been at the forefront of protests and sit-ins against the dictatorial regime of al-Bashir and his brutal Rapid Support Force militia.

Recently in London, the “Sudanese Women in the Diaspora for Ending the War” conference emphasized the importance of agency, empowerment, and justice for Sudanese women. Organized by the Sudanese Community and Information Center’s (SCIC) women’s branch, the event discussed the role of Sudanese women in the war and featured lectures, discussions, question-and-answer sessions, poetry, and memorial videos commemorating missing women.

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