By Geoffrey MUSHAIJA (PhD)
Unequivocally, Rwanda has made impressive success in women empowerment due to the country’s visionary leadership. Registered women performances and resilience to contribute to Rwanda’s reconstruction process is a live testimony.
Women have proved that ‘they can do it’ with their hands, hearts and mind. There is a woman behind every success in Rwanda. The 30 percent women reserved seats in decision making organs and 64 percent women members of parliament – the highest in the World is unbeatable.
However, unrecognised women home-bound routine activities and home-work life balance is a critical issue.
The shift in women’s roles and responsibilities and the failure of men’s mind-set to adjust towards supporting this shift is still a dominant bottleneck to women empowerment- both in rural and urban settings.
Patriarchal systems made women do heavy domestic workload such as farm work, fetching water, preparing food, collecting firewood and other duties with less support from men.
But today, women have the same roles and responsibilities as men in addition to home- bound routine activities.
We still witness in our communities women working for long hours with less rest and less share of the returns from their labour.
Some women always go to bed late and are the first to wake up the following day. These hazardous and unrecognised women workloads still hamper women self- improvement in our communities.
When we visit our families in the villages, you witness how our mothers are the first to wake up the morning to make breakfast, then go to the garden to dig up to mid-day when they come home to prepare lunch for the family.
After lunch, they do not rest, they will go to fetch water or collect firewood and the time taken will depend on the distance to the water source and availability of firewood in the neighbourhood.
In the evening, they prepare supper and they will retire to bed too late and exhausted, when all family members in the house are asleep and this routine continues throughout.
True measure of development is for women to have time to socialise, attend meetings, access opportunities, share and solve their problems, promote their livelihood advancement for self-improvement to consolidate and sustain women empowerment.
The author Geoffrey MUSHAIJA, is PhD (Economics) Land Policy Research Scholar University of Kerala-India