The operations of the Women’s Affairs Bureau (WAB), the national machinery for implementation of Government’s policies for women, were described in the Government’s last Report to the UN Committee on Women (CEDAW) in March 2016 as “complementary to that of the Domestic Violence Policy Unit and the Men’s Affairs Bureau (MAB), established within the Ministry.”

Defining priorities for women’s empowerment by reference to men’s needs and to the nebulous notion of ‘gender equality’ falls significantly short of the ringing commitment to women’s rights one would expect. While the President, the First Lady and a number of individual Ministers of Government seize opportunities and initiatives that reflect their personal commitment to the advancement of women, the systematic momentum required from Government machinery itself, as reflected in budgets and priorities, is woefully inadequate.

The CEDAW Report notes that one-per cent of the national budget is spent by the WAB, which is somewhat misleading since a significant portion of it is spent on men
The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) is aware of the need to sensitize men to the fact that equality of women is not about women living the way men live. At the same time empowering women is not a matter of pacifying men, as gender strategies sometimes imply, nor of tip-toeing around the discomfort men have to get accustomed to, nor delivered at a pace at which men’s acceptance can be assured beforehand. Misogyny or dislike for women can’t be fought one man at a time.

Men’s violence towards women is, to a significant extent, bound up with increasingly de-humanized conditions that men experience that has nothing to do with women. They have to do with over-crowded prisons, extortion by crooked policemen; exploitation of young men who are taken into the goldfields and building sites and promised wages that never materialise. And not enough people care. It becomes a gender problem when men take out their frustrations on the people closest to them, usually women and children.

This does not mean that the movement forward for women in Guyana must be defined by what causes problems for men. The State should take care of those issues separately. Likewise, Guyana’s commitment to the empowerment of women needs to be disconnected from a series of related agenda which end up marginalizing women’s rights. The most glaring example of this in recent times was the struggle to keep women’s rights front and centre of the fight against HIV. Violence against women and girl and their sexual dominance by partners was, by far, the main driver of HIV in Guyana and the Caribbean, but never achieved recognition from politicians nor funders, anywhere close to the attention and resources attracted by men who have sex with men.

The women’s movement in Guyana needs to be re-habilitated from its current re-active project-driven activities, to re-capture its dynamism, reset its values and dismantle the instinctive accommodation of other agenda. This transformational dynamism cannot be achieved until a Ministry for Women, or a mechanism of comparable force and resources is created to drive an integrated series of reforms through all other Government Ministries and Agencies.

The role of a Ministry exclusively dedicated to promoting women’s rights and interests would be to keep key issues on the agenda of other relevant organisations; provide the tailored advice and evidence-based information they require and to bring the voices, experiences and priorities of different sectors of Guyanese women to bear on Government.

A very useful service such a Ministry or comparable Agency could perform is to generate a large data-base of the skills and interests women in Guyana possess and which they are prepared to put at the service of others. The pool of such publicly known talents is currently lamentable, it should be much wider and deeper and used to transform all of the public Boards, Commissions and Committees into women-sensitive agencies.

The official slogan for International Women’s Day 2017, namely Be Bold For Change is timely in the Guyana context. The boldest move would be to demand that the rhetoric and personal support for women’s rights demonstrated by male leaders in many walks of life be institutionalized in a Government Ministry, or similar Cabinet level agency. Women’s rights are unquestionably the most serious human rights issue in Guyana and around the world. Anything less than significant structural change to promote them is an empty gesture.