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FM AMEMBASSY ABIDJAN
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INFO RUEHZK/ECOWAS COLLECTIVE

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 ABIDJAN 000346 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: KWMN SOCI KJUS IV
SUBJECT: IVOIRIAN WOMEN HELD BACK BY SOCIETY, POVERTY AND 
LACK OF EDUCATION 
 
ABIDJAN 00000346  001.3 OF 003 
 
 
¶1. (U) Summary.  Ivoirian jurisprudence puts women on an 
equal footing with men and protects their rights.  However, 
these laws are infrequently enforced due to ignorance of the 
law or societal pressures.  Ivoirian women from diverse 
sectors of society told Emboffs that Ivoirian women, 
especially women living in rural areas, need education and 
economic independence in order to become full-fledged members 
of society on an equal footing with men.  End Summary. 
 
Equal Before the Law 
-------------------- 
 
¶2. (U) A member of the Bar Association of Cote d'Ivoire told 
Emboff that all Ivoirian laws, including the Constitution, 
give men and women equal rights. Other interlocutors noted 
that Cote d'Ivoire has adopted most international agreements 
regarding equality for women and women's rights.  Both 
Ivoirian women and men earned the right to vote in 1946 when 
the country was a French colony.  A ministry specifically 
focused on women's issues was first created in 1975.  Today 
the Ministry of Family, Women and Social Affairs has an 
office with responsibility for gender equality and promotion. 
However, the fact that this Ministry was allocated to the 
opposition in the transition government is an indication that 
it was not considered very important to the president's camp 
and we understand that it is one of the most under-funded 
ministries in the government. 
 
¶3. (U) A Supreme Court judge told Emboff the law provides 
there will be no differences in salary based on gender and 
prohibits prospective employers from asking job applicants 
about their plans to form a family.  According to Embassy 
interlocutors, the problem seems to be women's failure to 
exercise their rights due to a lack of awareness of their 
rights as well as societal pressure.  One glaring exception 
to women's legal equality is the country's pension law, 
although it does not disadvantage women.  While a man's 
pension is transferred to his widow upon his death, a widower 
is not entitled to his wife's pension.  A law is being 
drafted at the Ministry of Justice to rectify this inequity. 
 
Politics - A Man's Game 
----------------------- 
 
¶4. (U) Most women Emboff spoke to said they have not faced 
discrimination or been disadvantaged in the exercise of their 
profession.  Approximately half of the members of the 
Ivoirian Bar Association are women and women are well 
represented in the judiciary.  Women lawyers seem to practice 
the full gamut of the law rather than being focused solely on 
women and family issues. One sector where women reportedly 
still face challenges to advancement is politics. 
 
¶5. (SBU) There are extremely influential women politicians in 
Cote d'Ivoire.  Simone Gbagbo, the country's First Lady, is a 
founding member of the FPI political party, serves as one of 
its vice presidents, and is a member of the legislature. 
Despite her stature, the First Lady does little to champion 
women's issues.  In fact, some female leaders have told 
Embassy that Mrs. Gbagbo has studiously avoided being too 
closely linked to women's causes for fear of not being taken 
seriously as a politician.  Henriette Dagri Diabate is the 
Secretary General of the RDR party, one of the country's 
three largest parties.  She has been active in the party for 
many years and was even imprisoned in 1999 as a result of her 
political activities.  However, women members of political 
parties told Emboff that in general women do not hold 
decision making positions in the parties. A woman who is the 
vice president of one of the country's smaller parties told 
Emboff that women party members are put to work cooking and 
dancing when the parties conduct mobilization campaigns. 
Several interlocutors noted that politics' image as a world 
of dirty tricks keeps women away.  Unfortunately, Cote 
d'Ivoire's crop of leading politicians isn't doing much to 
change that image. 
 
Role in Government 
------------------ 
 
¶6. (SBU) There are 32 cabinet ministers; 4 are women and they 
head up the Ministries of the Fight Against HIV/AIDS; 
Industry and Private Sector Promotion; Family, Women, and 
Social Affairs; and Reconstruction and Reintegration.  Both 
the Ministry of the Fight Against HIV/AIDS and the Ministry 
of Industry have large budgets.  The Minister of the Fight 
Against HIV/AIDS is related to and reportedly maintains good 
relations with the First Lady.  Both the president and the 
prime minister have some women advisors.  The president's 
diplomatic advisor and close confidante, recently deceased, 
was a woman. His closest collaborator is probably his wife, 
the First Lady.  There are 223 legislators; 19 are women. 
 
ABIDJAN 00000346  002.3 OF 003 
 
 
There are 200 mayors; 9 are women.  There are 56 general 
council presidents; 1 is a woman.  In a ranking of women's 
representation in African legislatures provided to Emboff by 
the Ministry of Family, Cote d'Ivoire ranks 33 out of the 54 
countries on the African continent.  In 2007, President 
Gbagbo issued a declaration on gender equality that 
encouraged public and private institutions to implement a 
thirty percent quota for women.  The Ministry of Family is 
editing a draft ordinance to be presented to the president 
for signature that would make the declaration's provisions 
the law.  The Ministry is also editing another ordinance that 
would modify the electoral code to require that party 
candidate lists be composed alternatively of men and women 
candidates in order to help ensure the election of at least 
thirty percent of women (often women's names appear at the 
bottom of candidate lists). 
 
Lack of Access to Education 
--------------------------- 
 
¶7. (U) While some pockets of society, especially in rural 
areas, continue to resist education for women, in general 
there is awareness of the need to educate girls.  Girls are 
especially disadvantaged in terms of access to education as a 
result of poverty.  Many children do not attend school 
because their parents cannot afford to put food on the table 
and also pay for school fees, books, pens, and paper. When 
parents cannot afford to educate all their children, in 
general they choose to educate some or all of their sons. 
NGOs have told Emboffs that sexual abuse by teachers is a 
problem that disproportionately affects girls and many of 
these victims become pregnant and have to interrupt or end 
their education. Women made up thirty-three percent of 
university students nationwide 2006-2007; there were 156,772 
students of which 52,201 were women. For school year 
2007-2008, while 64.5 percent of school age boys attended 
primary or secondary school, only 60.3 percent of school age 
girls were enrolled in school. 
 
The Plight of Rural Women 
------------------------- 
 
¶8. (U) Women in rural areas face significant challenges on 
account of their gender.  On a trip to northwestern Cote 
d'Ivoire, Emboff spoke with local and international NGOs 
working on women's issues in some of the most underdeveloped 
parts of the country, where violence against women is often 
pervasive.  NGO representatives expressed concern that 
village women have little, if any, formal education, and are 
dependent on their husbands to meet financial needs.  A local 
NGO based in Odienne, for example, said that around 70 
percent of women in the region have trouble saving even 100 
CFA (USD 20 cents) per month.  Husbands may provide for basic 
foodstuffs (rice, wheat, etc.) but women are responsible for 
providing the "sauce" for meals.  At mealtime, the women are 
often the last to eat, after their husbands and children. 
 
¶9. (U) Women are also entirely responsible for all expenses 
related to children until the children reach about 15 years 
of age. As a result, children are a heavy financial burden on 
rural women, even for those who are married.  Families with 
young daughters worry about them getting pregnant out of 
wedlock.  If this happens, NGO representatives said that 
young men will often deny that they are the father and leave 
a woman to care for the child alone.  Raising a child out of 
wedlock without a husband is not only financially burdensome 
but also considered shameful in northern Cote d'Ivoire so 
families try to avoid this situation at all costs.  This 
results in many girls being married off as soon as they reach 
puberty: some child brides are as young as 13.  Ivoirian law 
outlaws this practice, but penalties are rarely enforced in 
villages, where these matters are handled. Cases of this 
nature rarely make it to the Ivoirian judicial system, which 
is both complex and expensive.  Polygamy, although illegal, 
is also commonly practiced in rural, northern regions of Cote 
d'Ivoire.  The Secretary General of the Ivoirian Bar 
Association told Emboff that a bill was drafted to legalize 
polygamy, but it was shelved after the Bar Association 
opposed it. 
 
¶10. (U) The provisions of the country's land law, which dates 
from 1998, do not distinguish between men and women.  The law 
requires that traditional customary certificates be presented 
to establish ownership of rural land. In practice, in many 
regions of the country, rural land does not belong to 
individuals but to a chief who assigns use of certain 
parcels.  In most regions of Cote d'Ivoire, chiefs rarely 
assign parcels to women since it is not traditional for them 
to own land.  The civil law of 1964 provides that women can 
inherit from their husbands, but only if there has been a 
legal marriage.  Many women in the country are married in 
 
ABIDJAN 00000346  003.4 OF 003 
 
 
traditional ceremonies not recognized by the law and are thus 
barred from inheriting property from their husbands. 
 
Motherhood 
---------- 
 
¶11. (U) In general, Ivoirian women are encouraged to have 
children as a way of enhancing their social status.  Having 
children is seen as the ultimate goal of marriage, and there 
is immense social pressure on women to become mothers. 
Husbands of women who are unable or unwilling to have 
children will often divorce or abandon these women and take a 
mistress or another wife.  Additionally, as childless women 
grow older, they are often shunned by their own communities, 
who view them as witches or sorceresses intent on harming 
other people's children because they lack their own. 
 
¶12. (U) Comment.  Women's empowerment in Cote d'Ivoire, as 
elsewhere in the world, is dependent on access to education 
and literacy programs as well as financial independence and a 
shift in cultural attitudes. Embassy has often supported 
income generating projects under the Ambassador's Self-Help 
program which help, in part, to address these issues. 
Rising poverty rates, resulting from Cote d'Ivoire's 
political crisis, have caused the plight of rural women to 
deteriorate over the last six years.  HIPC debt relief should 
provide a benefit for women if the government invests more in 
the social sectors, and increases actions to achieve gender 
equality.  End Comment. 
 
 
 
 
NESBITT