IWD

International Women’s Day.

A Tanzania full team meeting that today had the theme of International Women’s Day. This is one of my new colleagues Joan, ensuring the meeting went smoothly. The celebration (including by all the men on the call) of women in the workplace was more vociferous than anything I’ve encountered in the UK. Here though there’s a bigger gulf between rhetoric such as this, and the day-to-day experiences of women in wider society, who on the whole are forced to accept a more subservient place. I’ve seen it too often for it to be coincidental, for example on a field visit when it will be the one woman in the group who defaults to food preparation. As a foreigner it’s not my place to be vocal, but I can gently raise things in a non-combative or lighthearted way, and it usually results in a useful conversation. After today’s statements of support for Tanzanian women striving for success at work, I will feel bolder in pointing out issues that aren’t enabling this rhetoric to translate into action. And hopefully people will be open as us men don’t want to be mere bags of hot air, do we.

Mozambique awards a public holiday for Women’s Day on 07 April to mark the death of a well-known female freedom fighter Josina Machel in 1971, four years before independence was achieved from Portugal.