Just 19% members across 69 COVID-19 response committees in Africa were women
Less than a fourth of the members of 334 task forces to curb the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) across 187 countries were women, the UN revealed March 23, 2021.
A COVID-19 task force is any national government institution created to respond to the pandemic across sectors.
The representation of women in Asia and Africa were much lower than the global average. Only 15 per cent members of the 75 task forces in Asia and 19 per cent members of the 69 task forces in Africa were women.
These figures were also lower than the share of women in COVID-19 task forces in United States of America (29 per cent), Europe (31 per cent) and Oceania (28 per cent), according to the COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker of the UN.
Policies that do not consult women or include them in decision-making are less effective, cautioned United Nations in a policy brief in April 2020.
Most impacted
In Africa, women were the worst sufferers of the pandemic and its socio-economic fallouts, said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa on March 8, 2021.
In Uganda and Ethiopia, for instance, more women lost jobs due to COVID-19 than men, a World Bank study showed.
Several United Nations agencies have also pointed highlighted this gender-skewed impact of the pandemic.
Women not represented in Nigeria
The Presidential Task Force was created in Nigeria to lead the government’s efforts to contain COVID-19. It has 12 members with only one woman.
UNDP chief, Achim Steiner, said in a statement:
Women have been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response…however, they have been systematically excluded from the decision-making processes on how to address the impacts of the pandemic.
The pandemic has undone decades of progress on gender equality, according to experts. To highlight women’s needs during the recovery process, it is imperative to ensure governments have women in decision-making roles.
Glimmer of hope
In South Africa, which has a considerable COVID-19 case burden, five task forces and committees were set up. In one of them, 60 per cent of the members were women. In the rest, half the members were women.
A larger share of Africa’s recovery measures are focused on women compared to other regions, according COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker tool by UN.
As of March 2021, nearly 9.2 per cent of the 3,112 COVID-19 fiscal, social protection and labour market measures targeted women’s economic security, according to the tool.
In Africa, however, 15.7 per cent of these measures focused on the economic security of women. This is higher than the Americas (12.6 per cent), Asia (9.3 per cent), Oceania (4.8 per cent) and Europe (3 per cent).
But measures have often been small-scale and temporary, flagged UN.
The United Nations Development Programme proposed a temporary basic income scheme for the 613 million working-aged women in poverty across the world.
The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women also called for “long-term specific measures to boost women’s recovery” in fiscal packages.
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