8 minute read
Bineta Diop
Senegal’s Bineta Diop (right) is known from coast to coast in Africa as perhaps the continent’s most formidable fi ghter for women’s rights and their empowerment. She founded the seminal Femmes Africa Solidarité (African Women’s Solidarity) movement, and participated in the development of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the Banjul Charter), as well as the development of the 2005 Maputo Protocol, which instituted women’s rights.
Diop has been heavily involved in reconciliation processes in countries such as Burundi, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as in election observation missions in several countries, and served on an inquiry commission about violence against women in South Sudan. She has been the special envoy of the President of the African Union Commission for women, peace, and security since 2014.
Advertisement
In 2011, Diop appeared in the Time100, the magazine’s annual list of the one hundred most infl uential people in the world. In 2012, she was made a knight of the Legion of Honour and in 2013, Fondation Chirac gave her an award for her actions pro moting female involvement in confl ict prevention.
Group Publisher Omar Ben Yedder met her during the recent Africa Industrialisation Week in Niamey, Niger for this exclusive interview with one of Africa’s most extraordinary campaigners.
Indomitable fi ghter for women’s rights
Bineta Diop became an activist fairly early in life. She was one of four daughters of Marèma Lô, a formidable politician and one of the continent’s early feminists who insisted that all her daughters get an education.
As the leader of the women’s movement in the Socialist Party of Senegal (founded in 1958 by Léopold Sédar Senghor), her mother, herself very young, fought to transform the community while bringing women’s issues to the fore.
Watching her mother’s strenuous grew up determined to bring the voices of Africans, particularly women, to the development of the continent and to help them take their destiny in their own hands.
She studied business in Paris and also international relations. After over a decade at the International Commission of Jurists – a human rights NGO based in Geneva - which was a further eye-opening experience,
Diop set up Femmes Africa Solidarité back in 1996 to pursue what had become her life’s vocation – the empowerment of African women. “I was doing this work in Asia, in Latin America working with another mentor, Neal McDermott, on issues of human rights. And I wanted to make a had. I’m passionate about women’s rights. It’s transforming society.
“We can have the Agenda 2063 or Agenda 2030 but as long as we don’t consider women as equal, we will be missing a lot,” she argues. “Women and youth have to be at the centre, at the core,” she says of her life-long labour of love.
But it is not only women who philosophy is that men must also be equally involved. Men can be part of the solutions, she says, adding that she shares this belief with another tower of the African establishment, former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, who is also Patron of the African Women Leaders Network.
Hence the launch of a movement called ‘Positive Masculinity’. The second edition of its annual conference was held in Dakar in December and was hosted by President Macky Sall.
“One thing we have found as African women leaders is that we have, for many years, been talking to ourselves,” she says. “We realised that if we have to advance gender issues in our society, we need to bring the men into the discourse, that’s the reality. We cannot continue to talk to ourselves. So we have this strategy to promote what we call ‘positive masculinity’, which is bringing men
This is Diop’s eighth year as the AU’s Special Envoy for Women, Peace and Security. She never expected to be in the position this long and extended it by a year at the request of the AU chairperson, Moussa Faki Mahamat.
As she nears the end of her tenure, speaking to us during Africa Industrialisation Week in Niamey, Diop has been a struggle to get her message across.
Yet it is her tireless energy that is raising women’s rights, especially peace and security. She says she was Mlambo Ngcuka, who was part of the mediation team, no women were at the table in the latest Ethiopian peace negotiations, but that it’s generally accepted that women are part of the solution today when it comes to
African framework is leading rest of the world
Special Envoy in 2014, few countries in Africa even had formal plans in place to advance women’s rights. Now there are 35 and counting that have adopted legislation to give them equal rights.
She led the implementation of a Continental Results Framework that allows for the progress of women in
concrete indicators. It is a matter of some pride to Diop that following the publication of the African framework, similar models have been developed in Europe and America. For once, she points out, Africa is leading the rest of the world. are also making progress in leadership and in business, she points out. Diop and other leaders have long advocated that there must be deliberate policies to empower African women, promoting their participation at the higher levels of politics and business.
This has led to some victories. In Kenya, the public procurement system gives women not only opportunities to participate in the process but also them take advantage of those opportunities.
A similar policy has been approved in Senegal, although implementation is yet to commence. Access be helped in no small way when more women are in Above: As an AU Envoy for Women, Bineta Diop crisscrosses the charge of investment funds. continent to carry her message of hope
The African Women Impact Fund, created in partnership with the United Nations, the African Union, the Economic Commission for Africa, is a response to this need.
Diop says funders have to be sensitive to the unique circumstances of women. “We realised that in the normal traditional bank, women can come and ask for $10m and men will ask for $10bn but the bank will spend the same time looking at the issues and the business plans of the women and the men. Of course, their interest is where the big money is but we think that they should spend more time on looking at the business plans of the women, because tomorrow that woman can present something that is bigger.” made so far? It’s a mixed bag, she admits. There are pragmatic and practical solutions to create safe spaces for women and young girls. In Niger, she explains, President Mohamed boarding schools for young girls to ensure they complete their education and are not married young.
In Rwanda, the Isanga project is a safe space where women who have experienced violence can go, knowing support.
But more needs to be done across was a particularly testing period, with many women facing increasing violence and poverty,” she explains. “The stay-at-home orders implemented by governments to curb infections led to a spike in domestic violence, while the economic impact was also felt disproportionately by women.” But Diop says Covid-19 is only one of the three Cs that are threatening the well-being of women. The other two to protect the interests of women. “In the last three years, we see that we have been going backwards on gender equality issues. We need to reenergise ourselves and we need to reinvent and innovate and make sure that we scale it up, [put] our solutions in our actions,” she emphasises.
the continent, she insists, including Passing the baton having free and anonymous hotlines However, as Diop approaches the end of her term, some of that energy will have protection. So for her, governments are to come from other sources. But her still too slow in getting things done, and getting the message across, she admits, has been painstakingly hard, Suluhu Hassan, where young women very entrenched patriarchal society. will be able to meet like-minded
“Implementation often lags leaders for an intergenerational conceptualisation and women in Africa dialogue. It is a way of passing on the baton – like her mother passed on and marginalisation. The pandemic hers. It is a mark of the weight of her legacy that the African Union has institutionalised will be appointed when she leaves. She is sure, however, that she has laid a foundation solid enough to support the success of whoever will replace her. She herself, she says, will continue to give her energy to the women of Africa, which is good, because few know as well as she does hand is. Success requires building alliances, convincing people that the change is needed and
Getting the message working to overcome resistance across has been Of her own experience she says, “For me, it was important that I negotiate painstakingly hard, and sometimes name and shame or often because she is compare, and also say that this country is doing better than this one. Where I having to fi ght a have been successful is when I brought very entrenched solutions, when I said, this is possible because it has been done somewhere patriarchal society. else.” These are the skills that her successor – and all those engaged in the battle for women’s empowerment – must bring to the task. But like going to the moon, something that must be done because the process is hard. The challenges, she says, must be used as opportunities and are a wake-up call that action is needed. “For me, I believe Africa has to take ownership of our destiny. With all that we have seen at the multilateral level, it is time we realise that we need to develop ourselves. No one will come and develop us. That is the reality and we are facing it now.” This realisation must bring Africa’s leaders, youth and of course women together to build the Africa of the future, one that is not known for pace akin to other continents.
