Women in Rwanda 1: Domestic Roles

On the surface, it seems like Rwanda has great women’s rights.  After the genocide, women who had previously had little say over household affairs, suddenly became heads of household and needed to learn to manage  all aspects of maintaining a family, include owning property, securing an income generating jobs and arranging for the children’s education.  Today, Rwanda has the highest concentration of women in parliament in the entire world with 56% of seats going to women, more than the 30% quota.  This is compared to 18% of congressional seats going to women in the US.  In addition they hold 33% of the cabinet and several senior positions throughout the government.  

But do these statistics of high powered professionals translate to everyday life for the average Rwandan woman?  I have decided that it has helped women make great strides in the last few years.  They can own property.  Every marriage starts with a declaration of how assets will be divided in the event of a divorce and it is usually split right down the middle.  Schools specifically for girls are being established left and right.  In fact, Maranyundo Girls School is supported by the first lady and was initially established because girl’s schools were lower quality and they were not doing as well on tests.  But last year, MGS scored the highest on the national exams of all the schools in the country!

But on the other hand, there are still very traditional perspectives toward the role of women in society.  One day a colleague said that I acted very Rwandan and I asked what he meant.  He told me that women are supposed to be “quiet and thankful.”  I was shocked and could not even take the comment as a compliment.

Women work hard here as they always have.  It is not at all uncommon to see men sitting around and chatting while drinking a beer and then to drive 100 yards down the road to see women toiling away at the fields with a baby on their backs.  Women are conventionally in charge of agriculture and the following excerpt came from an article about women empowerment and agriculture from the official government newspaper.

Women are many things; powerful, always right and most importantly nurturing. Women are naturally and beautifully designed with a ‘mother’s instinct’. This is why we created a mythical creature called ‘Mother Nature’, because we know that no one can take better care of the earth than a woman. She will make sure that the ‘home’ is always clean and beautiful.A true woman (or mother) will make sure that not one hair is out of place nor a single breath a minute too late. A real mother will call you to your room to tell you it is messy when one shoe is crooked. When it comes to women, the glass is neither full nor empty. It is clean. A true woman is meticulous.

I chose this article when searching for an article that showed obvious bias to share with the students. However, when I asked them if the article was fact based and true, they all agreed with it!  I really had to change the approach of my lesson after that.