The Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC), Moussa Faki Mahamat, has said the union has launched a campaign to eradicate violence against women and girls.
This year’s campaign calls for the upholding of the rights of women in both public and private institutions by granting them their quota through access to employment.
The campaign against Gender-Based Violence on women and girls started yesterday and will end on December 10, 2021, under the theme “Make the world Orange: End violence against women now.”
“We celebrate the International Day dedicated to the fight against all forms of gender-based violence, that is to say, the violence of which women and girls who are also our mothers, our wives, our sisters and our children are regularly subjected to,” Faki said.
The AU has modified the theme into “Make Africa Orange: African male leaders explore approaches of positive masculinity to end the scourge of violence against women and girls in Africa,” making it a responsibility of African men to strive towards ending impunity against women and girls.
Campaign starts
The President of the Democratic Republic of Congo Felix-Anthonnie Tshisekedi, who is also the chairperson of the union opened the inaugural conference yesterday in Kinshasa for the campaign for positive masculinity in Africa.
“The rise in intensity of violence against women in this context of confinement has been grafted onto older practices, no less characterised by the same blameworthy condescension towards women and girls, by virtue of cultural patterns that have been permanently inscribed in the male collective unconscious,” he said.
The conference was open to heads of states and government of the union, senior political figures in the political, economic and academic world and civil society.
“This conference responds to a question that the President of the Union has agreed to confer the status of a challenge that needs to be faced. Despite the multidirectional efforts deployed in favour of the fight against gender-based violence, this phenomenon, unfortunately, continues unabated,” Faki stressed.
“Worse, it has been reinforced and amplified in the particular context marked by the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the physical corollary of which has been lockdowns.”
He added that violence against women had increased during lockdowns linked to the COVID-19 pandemic according to the data collected.
“This indicates the emergence of a male profile structured by the anti-values of aggressiveness and violence, defying the minimal ethical rule imposing to all the recognition of the dignity of every human being,” he added.
He said the conference would smack the beliefs intertwined with women being subordinate, impunity which he said would aid in the building of a better Africa.
“In the logic of these efforts each man and each boy should consider himself as an important ally in the fight against violence against women and girls by adopting an ethical behaviour centred on the conviction that the man-woman relationship is complementary in the differentiation of its constitutive elements,” he concluded.
Maputo Protocol
In 2003, a protocol was adopted which was referred to as the “Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa”, (Maputo Protocol).
This was seen as a milestone in the fight for the rights of women in Africa which has so far inspired women and empowered them to elevate their participation in various spheres of leadership.
The protocol is said to have been endorsed in an estimated 42 African countries out of the 55 member states of the African Union.
It advocates against gender-based violence in public or private institutions and forbids all the practices that affect women and girl-child rights.