when they fall victim.
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National machineries for the advancement of women
Until the establishment of the National Commission on Women in Development (NCWID) in 1984, women in Malawi were mobilized through the League of Malawi Women of the Malawi Congress Party:
The NCWID, established for the integration of women into mainstream development, has its secretariat in the Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs and Community Services and plays an advocacy role, in addition to monitoring and evaluating programmes of government ministries. It also maintains linkages with public, private sector institutions and NGOs to ensure the inclusion of gender issues in their programmes. It operates through specialized committees (Legal, Education and Training, Family Health and:
Welfare Planning, Research and Evaluation, Employment, Small- and Medium-Scale Enterprises and Agriculture and Natural Resources) in which NGOs are represented.
NCWID has desk officers in all ministries and key organizations where they sensitize the incorporation of gender concerns in development endeavours; it represents women withinthe Government and is an important source of information on funding needs for women by bilateral and multilateral donors.
Through its specialized committees, the NCWID has achieved significant results. These include facilitating the establishment of the Business Advisory Service for Women, the National Association of Business Women, Women's World Banking (Malawi affiliate) and the National Family Welfare Council.
NCWID played an important role in the introduction of the three months' paid maternity leave for female civil servants, provision of technical support for women's organizations, formulation of a policy.on women, in Malawi and a five-year plan of action on women for the implementation of the policy.
Constraints faced by NCWID are dependence on financial allocation, absence of representation at grass-roots level, lack of premises of its own and reliance on ministry staff who serve as a secretariat.
Non-governmental organizations
Both international and national NGOs in Malawi emerged in response to the influx of Mozambican refugees into the country and to the natural disaster the country experienced, respectively. However, these categories are now focusing more on national development issues, particularly at the grass-roots level.
Programmes have been targeting women in areas such as health, water and sanitation, entrepreneurial development, agriculture and women's rights. In addition, women's organizations have emerged during the last fjve years which are mainly focusing on grass-roots women.
In spite of this development, local NGOs face financial and human resources constraints; further, due to their earlier involvement in relief work, most NGOs are concentrated in those areas/districts which were affected by refugees and natural disasters.
A government document "Situation of Poverty in Malawi" (1993) shows that poverty in both urban and rural areas affects more than 50 per cent of the population. In 1990, the World Bank estimated that 60 per cent of the small-holder population in Malawi is living below the poverty line (women make up 30 per cent of household heads).
The huge foreign debt and SAPs, together with a high annual population growth rate, have significantly contributed towards this state of affairs.
Generally, in Malawi, poverty affects a wide range of groups of people including small-holder farmers, casual labourers and estate agricultural workers, tenant farmers and the urban low-income households (both male- and female-headed). In the urban sector, one in every two females is a small-holder farmer, as compared to one in every 10 males; in the informal sector, 40 per cent of women are female employers and 9 per cent are self-employed, compared to 71 and 28 per cent respectively for males. Cases of beggars and street children are on the increase.
Energy
Beside biomass which accounts for 93 per cent of total energy consumption for which women have to walk between 2 and 8 km and carry between 25-35 kg of firewood per trip, the remaining energy sources are electricity and coal. In 1992, about 20 per cent of households in the urban areas and 1 per cent in the rural areas had access to electricity mains in their homes. Overall, only 3 per cent of Malawian homes had access to electricity mains in their home.
Women's access to resources
Safe drinking water: While 82 per cent of urban households have access to piped water, 48.5 per cent of them obtain water from a public tap. In rural households, 64.3 per cent get water from a well, 15.8 per cent from either a river, stream or spring and about 2 per cent from lakes, dams or ponds. At the national level, 54 per cent of all households obtain their water from sources that may be unsafe. The poor quality and quantity of water, long distances and time taken to collect it create an additional burden to
women.
From these indicators of urban unemployment, energy resource, water and sanitation facilities, Malawi women are still the most adversely affected by the widespread poverty in the country.
Conflicts and their effects on women
From 1986 to the present, Malawi has hosted about 1.2 million refugees (10 per cent of the Malawi population), mainly from Mozambique, and initially Malawian families shared their limited resources with them. Malawi has been able, with donor assistance, to provide the necessary facilities in such fields as health, education, sanitation, income-generation and related social welfare services. Malawi women workers, such as community development assistants and home craft workers, have played a major role in the rehabilitation of refugees. The refugee presence, however, has had an adverse impact on the environment, land availability and socio-economic amenities which, in turn, has affected Malawi women and children.
International support
Malawi has received assistance in the form of runds and/or technical assistance for individual projects some of them directly targeted at women from bilateral and multilateral donors. Crucial development areas such as education, population and health, agriculture and business development have benefited from donor support. Poverty alleviation programmes have received support from the World Bank, USAID, UNDP, the German Government, ADB, UNICEF, EC, ODA and UNIFEM. These donors have also provided
assistance to support business management skills training, credit facilities and institutional capacity building.
It is estimated that about 10,000 women have benefitted from this assistance. In the agricultural sector,
particular effort has been made to target some of the funding to women especially in the areas of access to
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credit and extension services. Some support has also been provided (UNFPA) for population-related activities to assist the community in services which include reproductive health and family planning.
A significant drawback, however, is that most of the donor-supported projects have been short term ..without built-in sustainability; as a result, they phase out as soon as donor support ends.
;= Conclusions and recommendations
Despite the efforts of the Malawi Government since 19,85 to implement the Nairobi Forward- looking Strategies and thereby improve the status of women, the analysis of the constraints women face in such areas as education, health, agriculture, employment and decision making, especially at the policy level, indicate that a lot of work still needs to be done to fully achieve the targets set by those Strategies. As Malawi has experienced the paradox of "economic growth and increased poverty", the current approach of growth through poverty reduction has recognized the need to give increased attention to women issues.
Because a series of recommendations have been made in respect of each critical area of concern in the national report, it will be practical in this summary to highlight the two main points that followed the conclusions of the report:
(a) The need for a more concerted and affirmative action;
(b) The promotion and support of the role of NGOs in implementing gender-sensitive programmes at the grass-roots level.
MAURITIUS
INTRODUCTION
Mauritius is made up of several islands, the major ones being Mauritius island and the Island of Rodrigues. Mauritius moved from a democratic parliamentary monarchy to a full-fledged Republic in 1992 by a constitutional vote in the National Assembly. Women represent 50 per cent of a population of 1.09
million.