Small steps lead to big strides

The seeming lack of progress in more women rising to high-level positions in government, business, and social, academic and even media circles has prompted criticism of the All-China Women Federation (ACWF). Women account for 21.33 percent of the deputies in the National People's Congress, the country's top legislature, an increase of 1.09 percentage points over that of five years ago.
Some think this progress is negligible and that the ACWF has not pushed hard enough. As a representative of the on-going 10th National Women's Congress, I had the same thoughts for some time, but I changed my mind this week after I looked more closely at what the ACWF and its branches have done over the past five years.
I think the ACWF deserves credit for the progress that Chinese women have made since 2003. We, who work in offices and live in urban centers, take some of these achievements for granted. Take for example the "safe-stretcher for mothers and babies" project in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
In this program, volunteers carry women in advanced pregnancy on stretchers from hilly hamlets that ambulances cannot reach, to township hospitals for safe delivery of their babies. This also eliminates the risk of their babies contracting tetanus. For several years, the local women's federation has worked with the region's public health bureau, businesses and charity organizations to raise money. In 2007 alone, they raised 1 million yuan to purchase 4,100 stretchers.
I don't think many of us urban women are aware of such projects as "safe-stretcher". Obviously, there is no comparison in terms of speed between an ambulance and people carrying a stretcher, but it means life or death for our sisters in the remote countryside. In Nandan, one of the under-developed counties in Guangxi, the mortality rate of women in childbirth was 116.5 per 100,000 four years ago. The safe-stretchers program reduced the rate to 25.86 per 100,000 in just a year's time. Last year, the safe stretcher program, along with 50 other programs, enabled 172,600 women to deliver their babies safely in Guangxi.
In 2003, a total of 8,000 women, or an average of 51.3 out of every 100,000, died during childbirth in China. Last year, the rate fell to an average of 36.6 out of 100,000. At the same time, the infant mortality rate also dropped. Over the years, ACWF and its local branches have carried out countless projects similar to the "safe-stretcher" program.
Through ACWF's "Spring Buds" program, more than 1.7 million female students have been able to go back to school with some 600 million yuan raised between the early 1990s and last year. Its project to build cellars in the homes of drought-hit villages to collect rainwater has been a big success. The rainwater collected in the cellars provides the much-needed drinking water for hundreds of thousands of rural households in western China.
At the local level, 292,700 women in agricultural and pastoral areas received some technical training in Qinghai last year. In Guangdong, hundreds of thousands of women were trained for jobs in sewing, electronics, accounting, hairdressing and cooking, enabling some 470,000 women to get new jobs after they were laid off or lost their land.
Although these are small steps, they are incremental and provide the foundation for women to seek higher goals, whether personal, political or social. Women will make big strides toward increasing their participation in political, social and academic spheres only when poverty, lack of education, unemployment and life-threatening health issues are resolved. That is what the ACWF has been addressing.

—The Daily Mail, China Daily news exchange item