Every 10th of December the international community commemorates the adoption, in 1948, of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. This year the theme chosen by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is ‘Fighting poverty, A matter of obligation, not charity’.

In 1976, the two pillars of international human rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights were ratified, however it took the international community almost twenty years after their ratification to acknowledge the universality and indivisibility of human rights particularly as these rights are embodied in these two covenants. And this year, for the first time ever, the economic and social dimension of human rights has been chosen as a focus for this day.

The World YWCA, an international membership movement of women and girls in more than 120 countries, welcomes this focus. It is said that poverty bears the face of a woman, which translates to the majority of the 1.5 billion people who live on less than one dollar a day. However, the feminisation of poverty goes beyond statistics to include cultures and systems that exclude and deny women their full human rights. Poverty, apart from just a lack of income, is also about power: “who wields it and who does not, in public life and behind closed doors.” This power is well entrenched in the social, political and cultural fabrics of our societies and manifests itself in women’s everyday existence, in both their public and private lives, in times of conflict and peace, in situations of want and of abundance.

The work of the World YWCA is about women’s empowerment. It is about opening up possibilities so that hope could start to take root, even in the most abject conditions. In more than 22,000 communities all over the world YWCAs are enabling women to exercise their right to an adequate standard of living for themselves and their families through literacy programmes, microcredit, training for life skills, day care centres, shelters, low-cost housing for working women and by many other methods. In the context of the AIDS pandemic, YWCAs in Africa are reaching out to affected and infected women in communities through their home-based care programmes as well as education and economic initiatives.

But addressing poverty is just one element in the whole story of women’s empowerment. The 2006 UN report on the Millennium Development Goals, reported on the advancements that have been made in terms of reducing absolute poverty and hunger, working towards universal access to primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, combating malaria, HIV and other diseases, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development. However, it identified that there is still a long way to go in terms of reaching the targets that governments have committed themselves to by 2015. In most of these, women fair much less than their male counterparts, whether it is poverty or lack of access to education.

On this Human Rights Day, we need not just a firm commitment to eradicating poverty. The international community also needs to take more concrete steps towards eliminating gender inequality so that women can at last live full lives, capable of exercising the full extent of human rights that each person in this world has been endowed with at the time of their birth.

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