Malawi’s Former President Joyce Banda
A former President of Malawi, Joyce Banda, has recently said that African women in politics do not need leadership trainings from the West rather they need financial support, to help them forge ahead adding that the advice she had received in the past had backfired.
Banda, Malawi’s first female President and the second woman to lead an African country after Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, told delegates at a conference on African women’s empowerment that a confrontational western style would not work in Africa.
She described how she had once received women’s leadership training in New York, where participants were told to be assertive, stand straight and look people in the eye.
“If I had done that, for example while talking to a traditional ruler in Africa, I would have been rejected immediately,” Banda said, explaining that she believed in feminism and in equal rights for women, but also in doing things the African way. “If you want to take the western route, all you will get is rejection, frustration. Confrontation will never work,” she said.
Banda described how, following the 1995 Fourth World Women Conference in Beijing where delegates called for international efforts to boost women’s political representation, she had printed a banner for a follow-up conference in Malawi with the slogan “99 Women in Office by 1999”.
Ensuring women’s full participation at all levels in political, economic and public life is one of the targets of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, an ambitious plan to end poverty and inequality agreed by world leaders last year.
