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**Captions by Project readOn**
I'm in Accra, Ghana.
It's stupefyingly hot, so my brain has coagulated.
Please bear with me while I search for viscidity.
I'm here to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the African Women's Development Forum,
which is an avowedly feminist organization, Pan-African in nature.
It does grant-making, it has doled out some $50 million over the last decade
to 800 projects in 42 countries.
Quite a remarkable achievement.
And the guest of honor and guest speaker yesterday was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,
the president of Liberia, who made some rather telling points
about the struggle for gender equality.
I hadn't realized it, but apparently of the 192 member sovereign states of the United Nations,
only 18 have heads of state or heads of government appointed or elected who are women.
That's fewer than 10%.
And of the 192 sovereign states, only 22 have more than 30% of the parliamentarians
who are women.
That's barely more than 10%.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was pointing out that if you want to change
the deplorable condition of women in Africa, whether it's poverty or *** and AIDS
or *** violence or economic autonomy,
you have to change the legislation.
And that requires the voices and argument and power and influence of women in parliament.
The crowd cheered wildly. The crowd was, in fact, restive and excited throughout.
And you could sense that even though it's gonna be a tough struggle ahead,
the days of the patriarchy are numbered.
It can't happen soon enough.
I'm Stephen Lewis.
**Captions by Project readOn**