By Staff
International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. Significant activity is witnessed worldwide as groups come together to celebrate women’s achievements or rally for women’s equality. Marked annually on 08 March.
International Women’s Day (IWD) is one of the most important days of the year to celebrate women’s achievements, raise awareness about women’s equality, lobby for accelerated gender parity, and fundraise for female focused charities.
President Cyril Ramaphosa in his weekly Newsletter published this week on international Women’s Day stated that there can be no meaningful progress for women if our society continues to relegate women to “traditional” professions, occupations or roles while it is mainly men who sit on decision-making structures.
Fittingly, the theme of this year’s international Women’s Day is women’s leadership and achieving an equal future in COVID-19 world. Since the coronavirus pandemic reached South Africa a year ago, the Women of South Africa have played a pivotal role in the country’s response. He added.
Ramaphosa “We salute the resilience and bravery of women frontline workers, who worked to fight the pandemic as nurses, doctor’s emergency personnel, police and soldiers. These include the tragic stories of women like Nurse Petronella Benjamin from Eerste River in the Western Cape who lost her life to COVID-19 just days before she was due to retire after 25 years as a nurse”
Ramaphosa also praised Azalet Dube from Doctors without Borders who went into communities to raise awareness about the disease. Who worked in health facilities as a contract tracer and who provided psycho-social support to families and individual in distress.
I wish all women of South Africa well on this day. He added that our experience of this pandemic has once more demonstrated women’s capacity to organize, collaborate, lead and achieve. Through their actions, they have demonstrated there’s is no such thing as “a woman’s place”