2004 award

Winner: Fatoumata Traoré
When: Thursday, May 6th, 2004
Where: Greeley Hall, Washington DC

AWARD CEREMONY PHOTOS

Fatoumata Traoré receives the Second Perdita Huston Human Rights Award.

TRANSCRIPT OF THE AWARD SPEECH

It is an honor and a great opportunity to be here today in this esteemed setting. It is my greatest hope that the information I share about my experiences with women and girls will underscore the importance of US government support for programs that promote women's rights, women's empowerment and the participation of women in building and strengthening civil society.

It is clear that one cannot speak of human rights, or women's rights, without taking into account both economic and social as well as cultural rights. In Mali , political will does exist, however the transition from a traditional society, to one in which all have equal rights entails substantial change. Nevertheless, Mali has taken the path and become engaged in an equitable development process focusing on rights in the educational system and the health sector, to name just two of the many areas they are attempting to address. Mali has also undertaken some commendable efforts in terms of rights of women and children, such as:

With the advancement of democracy many women's organizations, like my own, have come into being. They have organized themselves into networks for the promotion and well being of their rights and their future. They aspire to fill political positions and are interested in the path that Mali will follow as a nation. Five out of the 27 Ministers are women, including the Minister of Health, the Minister of Employment and the Minister of Justice. Nevertheless women are confronted with a number of obstacles including:

It is important to pursue and intensify our struggle to protect women against the four "too's" that kill women and destroy families - pregnancies too early, pregnancies too frequently, pregnancies too close together, or too many pregnancies. Although for many of you in this room this may seem preposterous, but most Malian women do not have the right to make these basic decisions on their own.

Through my organization - ASDAP - I have been working closely with CEDPA to implement the most effective programs to help women gain access to their rights. This began in 1982 with the implementation of the first family planning program in rural Mali . Through our program, we integrated reproductive health with literacy, income generation, environmental programs, nutrition and malaria. For the first time, rural women were able to control their own fertility.

Following Cairo, the program expanded to address adolescents and youth, recognizing that 41 percent of Mali 's population is under the age of 20.

What challenges remain?

Mali is a vast country, and many programs aimed at improving the lives of women and youth have been implemented by NGOs with excellent results. However, the problems continue. Youth and women continue to pay a large price. Though they are aware of their rights, access to them is still limited by:

One of the major obstacles that remain in Mali is the lack of funding resources to sustain as well as expand current programs.

In this somber setting, our young people, especially, are paying a very heavy price. Girls from 15 to 18 are dying more from causes linked to pregnancy than from any other single factor. The risk of their dying during childbirth is two times greater than that of women in the 20 to 29 age group. For girls under 15, it is five times higher.

Like other countries, Mali is also facing the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The HIV+ rate among women is almost twice that of men.

There are also extensive social constraints that continue to jeopardize the well being of our women at the outset of marriage and the onset of fertility. These constraints create tremendous pressures that only aggravate the physiological risks to which all adolescent mothers are exposed.

Furthermore, harmful practices on a large scale strongly affect the health and well being of both women and children. The worst of these practices is that of female genital cutting (FGC), which is called excision in Mali-a practice that affects more than 92 percent of women between the ages of 15-49. A large majority of young girls, some no older that six months, are forced to undergo this torture.

This painful situation weighs heavily on the conscience of both men and women.

In a testimony to the poignant history of these rural women with whom I have worked with and for, may I say that I can still see the faces of the women who came to me for prenatal consultations in 1982. They never gave birth at the maternity facility. And each time I saw them for the next prenatal consultation--less than a year after the last birth--they would the there without their last baby, which had invariably died before the first rainy season.

In closing I would like for us to remember that decentralization and democratization go hand in hand with work at the grassroots level. In the countries of sub-Saharan Africa , we can never talk about our three "d's" - decentralization democratization and development- without involving the NGO community and the private sector. Our governments and our NGOs complement each other's work at the community level. No government can reach the community all alone.

And so it is critically important for USAID to continue to fund our NGOs - to invest not only bilaterally, government to government, but to invest also in our private sector, community-based organizations. For without important investment actually earmarked for the private sector - our grassroots organizations, we will find it increasingly difficult to work effectively in our communities and the achievements of many of our previous investments, and especially our investment in the rights, the health and the education of women and children, will be lost.

I hope that my presentation will encourage the American government to continue its support of the NGO sector in developing countries.

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