Women's Rights

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Pls Save a Girl Child.. Pls?????????

“What was specified would have resulted in a very robust program,” said an executive with a development firm that implements gender programs for USAID. The executive, like other development specialists working for USAID who were interviewed for this story, did not want to be identified, citing concerns that their comments could affect their relationship with the agency.

To achieve that goal, USAID insisted that the winning contractor conduct several specific activities. They included establishing a strategy for augmenting women’s rights, building a legal-aid system for women, distributing public-education material that advises women of their rights, and implementing incentives for registrars to ensure that marital property is registered in the names of both spouses.

But USAID also sought to remedy another problem. In soliciting bids for the land program last March, the agency said that “women in Afghanistan have few rights to inherit, obtain or transfer land.” It said the initiative, called Land Reform in Afghanistan, was “expressly designed to enhance and improve land use and ownership rights of women.”

Titles to the same plots of land were handed to different people by a succession of governments and local warlords. Squatters have exploited the vacuum of authority to claim abandoned farmland. Fearful of eviction if the central government is able to regain control of contested areas, many turn to the Taliban for protection.

Women’s land rights

USAID’s land reform program was intended to address one important but little-recognized cause of conflict in Afghanistan: the lack of clear property ownership records, which is a result of decades of warfare and the absence of an effective government.

“The women of Afghanistan find themselves disconnected from one another, lacking opportunities to participate in the political and economic life of the nation,” the strategy states. “We must support the women of Afghanistan as agents of change.”

Despite the changes in the land reform program, USAID says it is not backing down from helping Afghan women. The agency recently issued a new strategy that calls for incorporating assistance to women into all of its Afghan programs.

In an effort to mollify those concerns, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promised last month that the United States “will not ... support a political process that undoes the social progress that has been made in the past decade.”

New rules being drafted by President Hamid Karzai’s government would bar private safe houses for women who are fleeing abuse and place new rules on those seeking refuge in the country’s 14 public shelters, including forcing women to submit to medical examinations and evicting them if their families want them back. The proposed rules would also bring the shelters — funded by international organizations.

Women’s advocates say the restrictions on shelters, which have been embraced by religious conservatives sympathetic to the Taliban, are an early sign of the compromises the Karzai government is willing to make to reach a peace deal with insurgents. The advocates fear that reconciliation with the Taliban — a goal supported by the U.S. government — will result in a significant erosion of women’s rights.

The changes come at a time of growing concern among rights advocates that the modest gains Afghan women have achieved since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001 are being rolled back.