GUYANA has made significant strides towards the Millennium Development Goal 3 (MDG3), Canadian graduate student Michelle Bobala reported last Friday.

Making a presentation on her findings to the Red Thread Organisation, she said gains were on the MDG3 indicators even prior to the 2000 implementation of the framework.
Bobala, who recently graduated from York University in Toronto, Canada completed her Masters Degree in International Development Studies and the topic she chose for her final research paper was ‘The relevance of MDG3 in Georgetown, Guyana’.
She said, after three months of intense researching, inclusive of document analysis and semi-formal interviews with grassroots women, personnel from government bodies, international and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), it was revealed that Guyana had already, significantly, progressed on the MDG3 indicators.
MDG3 seeks to promote gender equality and empower women and that objective is measured through three main ways, the proportion of women and girls in primary education, the ratio of women formally employed in the non-agricultural sector and the number of them represented in the national parliaments.
Bobala said: “While there is a variety of gender focused programmes, there is nothing tailored on MDG3. There is no work being done related to MDG3 even for women advocacy organisations, since they are often focused on their mandates.”

ALREADY PROGRESSED
Nevertheless, as indicated by the data collected, Guyana had already progressed on MDG3 prior to it being implemented.
She said the search revealed that, during the mid-1990s, girls and women had been equally represented at primary and secondary levels and, by 2006, they outnumbered males at secondary and tertiary levels.
Similar results are shown for the other two indices, as the 2011 MDG Report ‘Women in Non-Agricultural employment’ illustrated that there was an increase in the share of women in wage employment in the non-agricultural sectors from 29 percent to 33 percent from the year 1991 to 2006. And further, a 31.3 percent women representation in Guyana’s National Assembly.
With the aim to determine the relevance of the MDG3 framework and, additionally, whether both Guyanese and international institutions were meeting the mark and focusing on the real issues of Guyanese women, Bobala concluded that the system is useless in Guyana.
According to her: “The framework is irrelevant for Guyanese both at an institutional level and for grassroots women. These goals, which were established, particularly to assist the poverty stricken, are actually not helping grassroots women.
“… they need to be more focused on issues actually affecting women.”
She said these issues, as indicated from the data collected, are the exacerbated burden of poverty on women; inadequacies in education and training; the elimination of violence against women and inadequate mechanisms for the advancement of women.
As to her reasons for conducting her research in Guyana, Bobala explained that there were several.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Firstly, after asking her professor if she knew of any women advocacy organisiation that ‘works beyond service provision advocating, substantially, to empower women’, the latter spoke of Red Thread and provided her with the contact information of its coordinator, Karen De Souza.
Secondly, Bobala wanted to ascertain the relevance of the framework in a socio-political context, from a person in an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country perspective.
She came here, originally, in March 2011, spent six months volunteering in the Red Thread from March to August that year, to identify the area she wanted to research.
After deciding on the subject area, Bobala returned in May 2012 and spent through August gathering the data required to complete her research paper.
Upon concluding her assignment, she declared that, since Guyana had already achieved the indicators for MDG3 before the framework was implemented, the goals may be too low or stagnating any room for progress.
Bobala suggested that Guyana should have been working towards the goals identified by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) instead.

(Tash Van Doimen)