Rural women’s walk to prosperity is still a long and winding road
|Published
Historically, on August 9, 1956, some 20 000 South African women of all races staged a march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest against the proposed amendments to the Urban Areas Act.
In the modern world, it seems that millions of women, especially those from rural areas, in 2024 still have to march in very difficult circumstances to make a living and attain prosperity.
When I started primary school two decades ago, I went to a school where all teachers were women. The Gauteng farm school was built of mud bricks and had just four classrooms.
To place it in context, Grade 1 had its own classroom and teacher. Grades 2 and 3 were in the same classroom sharing a single teacher, while grade 4 and 5 also shared a class and one teacher. Grades 6 and 7 were also in the same class sharing one teacher who happened to be the principal.
To classify that school in what is today called a Quintile 1 school would be to misrepresent it. It should have been called a Quintile 00 school. The children who went there often came from households where no-one was employed. Those kids whose parents were employed were farm-workers and nothing more.
The teachers, which were five women, did not live in that area. They came from different parts of a township located on the other side of the local town. In the morning, they car pooled to get to the school and back. Despite all these challenges, the school performed consistently well for generations. Those teachers taught two or three generations of the families with dedication and care.
However, when I had to finish my primary school in another province, its staff consisted of one male teacher and a handful of women teachers. The school’s principal, who happened to be male, had just died.
In my personal experience, in many rural areas the majority of teachers are overwhelmingly female, yet the majority of principals and deputy principals are male. If you go a level down the chain of command, you find that most departmental heads are male with a sprinkling of female ones. Let alone those (women) who ended up being promoted to being circuit managers. For much of my school-going years, I have never seen a woman circuit manager come to any of the schools I went to.
This skewed gender hierarchy in rural areas extended beyond schools.
When I went to the clinic or hospitals, the nurses there were overwhelmingly female. However, for a very long time, most health facilities had men as CEOs.
In rural areas, it is not uncommon to go into a supermarket and find that cashiers are 70% or more women, but when you call for the store manager, most often it will be a man.
I also know of one municipality that has never had a woman mayor since 1996. But in that municipality, a woman has been a deputy mayor to three men as we head to the local government election in 2026.
It cannot be that over the past 30 years, women only qualify for entry level positions then once in the system after gaining insights and experience, suddenly fail to qualify for management positions. If indeed that is the case, something is wrong and the country has not been fixing it.
For many women, promotion and growth means that they have to abandon rural areas and head to urban areas. We should not forget that apartheid in many ways condemned women to these rural areas. That they have to move to urban areas to move to a more managerial role is just unfair.
There are many women empowerment programmes. However, it seems that they fail to reach rural areas where the population is mainly women. If South Africa fails to develop rural areas, then it is denying women the opportunity to grow and thrive.
Some 30 years into democracy and close to 70 years since the Woman’s Day march to the apartheid Union Buildings, we cannot expect rural women to have to literally march all over the country to be recognised and compensated for their role in South Africa’s socio-economic development.
Given Majola is a Business Report journalist who is passionate about youth and socio-economic issues.
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