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“From an integrity standpoint, women have proved to be less corrupt as councillors than men. I have not had to intervene with any disciplinary action for any woman councillor since the last election,” said Dr Chombo to wild applause from the delegates.
He said 18 percent of urban councillors and 19 percent of rural district councillors were women, a figure he said he hoped would be increased in the next elections.
“Ladies and gentlemen, promoting gender equality and improving the status of women remains a top priority on Zimbabwe’s development agenda and therefore, as the Government, we have signed many regional and international instruments as standards for achieving this goal. It is in this spirit that Zimbabwe took the opportunity to ratify the Sadc Protocol on Gender and Development in 2009,” said Dr Chombo.
He said the country was committed to achieving the 28 targets set out by the protocol for 2015 and called on Zimbabweans to unite to achieve that.
“In my ministry, I want to say that we too are making efforts to ensure that we not only meet our targets, but we do so in a meaningful and sustainable manner. Ours will not be a window dressing type of implementation,” said Dr Chombo.
He said his ministry had achieved a number of milestones towards the fulfillment of the protocol’s goals through deliberately crafting policy that virtually eliminated gender bias in local governance.
Dr Chombo urged Zimbabweans to unite in removing barriers that society, culture and upbringing had placed in the way of half of the country’s population so that it truly becomes a land of equal opportunity for every citizen.
In a presentation after Dr Chombo’s speech, the director of human resources in the Ministry of Local Government, Rural and Urban Development, Ms Erica Jones, contextually defined corruption as “the use of power by Government officials for illegitimate private gain”.
“Of late, I have been using information from the ministry to point out that women, from both the political and executive sides of local authorities, have a better record of honesty. In the past three years, only one senior woman official has been dismissed from a local authority for dishonesty and no woman councillor has been dismissed on her own for corruption,” said Ms Jones.
She said two schools of thought existed on the subject.
“The first coincides with my beliefs and that women are generally less prone to corruption than men,” said Ms Jones.
She said in a study by Dollar, Fisman and Gatti on behalf of the World Bank, the findings were summarised as; “Numerous behavioural studies have found women to be more trustworthy and public spirited than men. These results suggest that women should be particularly more effective in promoting honesty in Government.
Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that the greater the representation of women, the lower the level of corruption.”
She said the second school of thought stated that statistics on gender and corruption were not reliable because women had generally been marginalised and had not had equal exposure to temptation for corruption like men.
“Alhassan Alolo concludes that ‘Women may not prove less corrupt in the public sector if corrupt opportunities and networks are not restrained.”
About 80 delegates from local authorities in the country are attending the two-day event, to make presentations on how they have promoted gender equality.
They are competing in 10 categories and the winners and runners-up will represent the country in the third regional summit on Local Government, Gender Justice
Summit awards in South Africa from 23 to 25 April.
The winner will be presented with awards today.
The programme is being organised by Gender Links, a non-governmental organisation.
Online Reporter