African Women Leaders Meet in Maputo

Maputo

“Women are born to live and not to die”, declared Mozambique’s former first lady, Graca Machel on Saturday.

Machel, who currently heads one of Mozambique’s best-known NGOs, the Community Development Foundation (FDC), was speaking at the opening session in Maputo of a meeting of African Women Leaders, and she was referring to the high rates of maternal mortality in Africa.

“All the major diseases mostly kill women and children”, she exclaimed. “It’s not right that women should be dying every day”.

Women died silently and anonymously, Machel added, ending up as “nothing more than a simple statistic”.

Machel noted that there has been talk about reducing maternal mortality for more than two decades, but nothing had been done. “Women are always last in programmes to cut death rates in Africa”, she said.

Turning to the AIDS epidemic, Machel said it was not enough to talk of abstinence, faithfulness and the use of condoms to prevent women from being infected by the HIV virus that causes AIDS.

“In recent years, infected women are young and faithful”, she argued. “These faithful women caught the HIV virus in their homes, infected by their own husbands”.

Asked how to prevent this, Machel suggested the use of microbicides. While there is no microbicide on the market that offers 100 per cent protection against HIV, the ones that do exist are 70 per cent effective - and so could help save many lives.

The meeting is intended to draw up a balance sheet of the progress made in promoting women’s rights in Africa.
News Courtesy : All Africa.com

Tags: HIV