Economics

• 70% of illiterate people in Africa are women
• Africa is host to more than 7m migrant women
• 80% of female headed households in South Africa have no wage earners
• 70% of African children under the age of six in South Africa live below the poverty line
Violence

• A woman is killed every six hours by her intimate partner in South Africa
• Cases of domestic violence dropped from 260 082 in 2003/2004 in South Africa to 249 369 in 2004/2005; reported cases of rape increased from 52 733 in 2003/2004 to 55 114 in 2004/2005 (SA Police Service, 2005).

Health

* Africa is home to more than 25 million of the estimated 39 million people infected with HIV worldwide.
• In sub-Saharan Africa, women are 30% more likely to be HIV-positive than men. Population-based studies say that 15–24-year-old African women, on average, are 3.4 times more likely to be infected than their male counterparts.
• South Africa’s Department of Health said in 2005 that more than 6.5 million of South Africa's 44 million population are probably HIV positive compared with 5.6 million at the end of 2003. It said 29.5 percent of pregnant women surveyed were HIV positive, up from 27.9 percent in 2003. In KwaZulu-Natal, the HIV prevalence rate among pregnant women was more than 40 percent.
* In 2004 between six and nine billion male condoms were distributed globally, but only 12 million female condoms.
* According to the Cancer in Africa report, Africa has less than 100 radiotherapy machines in operation.
• 54 in every 100 000 Zimbabwean women have cervical cancer, there are four oncologists in that country and one radiotherapy machine .
• A lack of contraception sees 76 million unintended pregnancies in the developing world and 19 million unsafe abortions internationally each year.
• Worldwide, young women aged 15 to 24 are 1.6 times more likely to be HIV+ than young men.
• Four out of five new infections in the 15 to 24 age group in Zimbabwe are girls, and orphaned girls are three times more likely to contract HIV than their non-orphaned peers."
Education

• There are 600 million illiterate women compared to 320 million men.
• Every year of a mother's education corresponds to between 5 to 10 per cent lower mortality rates in children under the age of five.

(sources: Budlender 2002; Gender Advocacy Programme, 2001; Medical Research Council and University of Cape Town, 2005; Rape Crisis, Cape Town, 2004; South African Police Service statistics, 2005; UNAIDS 2004; SA Department of Health, July 2005; Premier Mbazhima Shilowa, Gauteng address of Commonwealth Investment Forum (2005) )

*1 Irin, 11 October 2005
*2 The Herald (Harare), 12 October, 2005
*3 UN Population Fund, October 2005
*4 Dr Festo Kavishe, UNICEF's Representative in Zimbabwe, October 2005
*5 The Promise of Equality: Gender Equity, Reproductive Health and the Millennium Development Goals, The State of the World Population, 2005, United Nations
*6 ibid

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