IVOIRIAN WOMEN HELD BACK BY SOCIETY, POVERTY AND

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 ABIDJAN 000346

SENSITIVE
SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: KWMN SOCI KJUS IV
SUBJECT: IVOIRIAN WOMEN HELD BACK BY SOCIETY, POVERTY AND
LACK OF EDUCATION

ABIDJAN 00000346 001.3 OF 003



1. (U) Summary. Ivoirian jurisprudence puts women on an
equal footing with men and protects their rights. However,
these laws are infrequently enforced due to ignorance of the
law or societal pressures. Ivoirian women from diverse
sectors of society told Emboffs that Ivoirian women,
especially women living in rural areas, need education and
economic independence in order to become full-fledged members
of society on an equal footing with men. End Summary.

Equal Before the Law
--------------


2. (U) A member of the Bar Association of Cote d'Ivoire told
Emboff that all Ivoirian laws, including the Constitution,
give men and women equal rights. Other interlocutors noted
that Cote d'Ivoire has adopted most international agreements
regarding equality for women and women's rights. Both
Ivoirian women and men earned the right to vote in 1946 when
the country was a French colony. A ministry specifically
focused on women's issues was first created in 1975. Today
the Ministry of Family, Women and Social Affairs has an
office with responsibility for gender equality and promotion.
However, the fact that this Ministry was allocated to the
opposition in the transition government is an indication that
it was not considered very important to the president's camp
and we understand that it is one of the most under-funded
ministries in the government.


3. (U) A Supreme Court judge told Emboff the law provides
there will be no differences in salary based on gender and
prohibits prospective employers from asking job applicants
about their plans to form a family. According to Embassy
interlocutors, the problem seems to be women's failure to
exercise their rights due to a lack of awareness of their
rights as well as societal pressure. One glaring exception
to women's legal equality is the country's pension law,
although it does not disadvantage women. While a man's
pension is transferred to his widow upon his death, a widower
is not entitled to his wife's pension. A law is being
drafted at the Ministry of Justice to rectify this inequity.

Politics - A Man's Game
--------------


4. (U) Most women Emboff spoke to said they have not faced
discrimination or been disadvantaged in the exercise of their
profession. Approximately half of the members of the
Ivoirian Bar Association are women and women are well
represented in the judiciary. Women lawyers seem to practice
the full gamut of the law rather than being focused solely on
women and family issues. One sector where women reportedly
still face challenges to advancement is politics.


5. (SBU) There are extremely influential women politicians in
Cote d'Ivoire. Simone Gbagbo, the country's First Lady, is a
founding member of the FPI political party, serves as one of
its vice presidents, and is a member of the legislature.
Despite her stature, the First Lady does little to champion
women's issues. In fact, some female leaders have told
Embassy that Mrs. Gbagbo has studiously avoided being too
closely linked to women's causes for fear of not being taken
seriously as a politician. Henriette Dagri Diabate is the
Secretary General of the RDR party, one of the country's
three largest parties. She has been active in the party for
many years and was even imprisoned in 1999 as a result of her
political activities. However, women members of political
parties told Emboff that in general women do not hold
decision making positions in the parties. A woman who is the
vice president of one of the country's smaller parties told
Emboff that women party members are put to work cooking and
dancing when the parties conduct mobilization campaigns.
Several interlocutors noted that politics' image as a world
of dirty tricks keeps women away. Unfortunately, Cote
d'Ivoire's crop of leading politicians isn't doing much to
change that image.

Role in Government
--------------


6. (SBU) There are 32 cabinet ministers; 4 are women and they
head up the Ministries of the Fight Against HIV/AIDS;
Industry and Private Sector Promotion; Family, Women, and
Social Affairs; and Reconstruction and Reintegration. Both
the Ministry of the Fight Against HIV/AIDS and the Ministry
of Industry have large budgets. The Minister of the Fight
Against HIV/AIDS is related to and reportedly maintains good
relations with the First Lady. Both the president and the
prime minister have some women advisors. The president's
diplomatic advisor and close confidante, recently deceased,
was a woman. His closest collaborator is probably his wife,
the First Lady. There are 223 legislators; 19 are women.

ABIDJAN 00000346 002.3 OF 003


There are 200 mayors; 9 are women. There are 56 general
council presidents; 1 is a woman. In a ranking of women's
representation in African legislatures provided to Emboff by
the Ministry of Family, Cote d'Ivoire ranks 33 out of the 54
countries on the African continent. In 2007, President
Gbagbo issued a declaration on gender equality that
encouraged public and private institutions to implement a
thirty percent quota for women. The Ministry of Family is
editing a draft ordinance to be presented to the president
for signature that would make the declaration's provisions
the law. The Ministry is also editing another ordinance that
would modify the electoral code to require that party
candidate lists be composed alternatively of men and women
candidates in order to help ensure the election of at least
thirty percent of women (often women's names appear at the
bottom of candidate lists).

Lack of Access to Education
--------------


7. (U) While some pockets of society, especially in rural
areas, continue to resist education for women, in general
there is awareness of the need to educate girls. Girls are
especially disadvantaged in terms of access to education as a
result of poverty. Many children do not attend school
because their parents cannot afford to put food on the table
and also pay for school fees, books, pens, and paper. When
parents cannot afford to educate all their children, in
general they choose to educate some or all of their sons.
NGOs have told Emboffs that sexual abuse by teachers is a
problem that disproportionately affects girls and many of
these victims become pregnant and have to interrupt or end
their education. Women made up thirty-three percent of
university students nationwide 2006-2007; there were 156,772
students of which 52,201 were women. For school year
2007-2008, while 64.5 percent of school age boys attended
primary or secondary school, only 60.3 percent of school age
girls were enrolled in school.

The Plight of Rural Women
--------------


8. (U) Women in rural areas face significant challenges on
account of their gender. On a trip to northwestern Cote
d'Ivoire, Emboff spoke with local and international NGOs
working on women's issues in some of the most underdeveloped
parts of the country, where violence against women is often
pervasive. NGO representatives expressed concern that
village women have little, if any, formal education, and are
dependent on their husbands to meet financial needs. A local
NGO based in Odienne, for example, said that around 70
percent of women in the region have trouble saving even 100
CFA (USD 20 cents) per month. Husbands may provide for basic
foodstuffs (rice, wheat, etc.) but women are responsible for
providing the "sauce" for meals. At mealtime, the women are
often the last to eat, after their husbands and children.


9. (U) Women are also entirely responsible for all expenses
related to children until the children reach about 15 years
of age. As a result, children are a heavy financial burden on
rural women, even for those who are married. Families with
young daughters worry about them getting pregnant out of
wedlock. If this happens, NGO representatives said that
young men will often deny that they are the father and leave
a woman to care for the child alone. Raising a child out of
wedlock without a husband is not only financially burdensome
but also considered shameful in northern Cote d'Ivoire so
families try to avoid this situation at all costs. This
results in many girls being married off as soon as they reach
puberty: some child brides are as young as 13. Ivoirian law
outlaws this practice, but penalties are rarely enforced in
villages, where these matters are handled. Cases of this
nature rarely make it to the Ivoirian judicial system, which
is both complex and expensive. Polygamy, although illegal,
is also commonly practiced in rural, northern regions of Cote
d'Ivoire. The Secretary General of the Ivoirian Bar
Association told Emboff that a bill was drafted to legalize
polygamy, but it was shelved after the Bar Association
opposed it.


10. (U) The provisions of the country's land law, which dates
from 1998, do not distinguish between men and women. The law
requires that traditional customary certificates be presented
to establish ownership of rural land. In practice, in many
regions of the country, rural land does not belong to
individuals but to a chief who assigns use of certain
parcels. In most regions of Cote d'Ivoire, chiefs rarely
assign parcels to women since it is not traditional for them
to own land. The civil law of 1964 provides that women can
inherit from their husbands, but only if there has been a
legal marriage. Many women in the country are married in

ABIDJAN 00000346 003.4 OF 003


traditional ceremonies not recognized by the law and are thus
barred from inheriting property from their husbands.

Motherhood
--------------


11. (U) In general, Ivoirian women are encouraged to have
children as a way of enhancing their social status. Having
children is seen as the ultimate goal of marriage, and there
is immense social pressure on women to become mothers.
Husbands of women who are unable or unwilling to have
children will often divorce or abandon these women and take a
mistress or another wife. Additionally, as childless women
grow older, they are often shunned by their own communities,
who view them as witches or sorceresses intent on harming
other people's children because they lack their own.


12. (U) Comment. Women's empowerment in Cote d'Ivoire, as
elsewhere in the world, is dependent on access to education
and literacy programs as well as financial independence and a
shift in cultural attitudes. Embassy has often supported
income generating projects under the Ambassador's Self-Help
program which help, in part, to address these issues.
Rising poverty rates, resulting from Cote d'Ivoire's
political crisis, have caused the plight of rural women to
deteriorate over the last six years. HIPC debt relief should
provide a benefit for women if the government invests more in
the social sectors, and increases actions to achieve gender
equality. End Comment.




NESBITT