Sara Hlupekile Longwe is a consultant on gender and development based in Lusaka

Lusaka

Lusaka is the capital and largest city of Zambia. It is located in the southern part of the central plateau, at an elevation of about 1,300 metres . It has a population of about 1.7 million . It is a commercial centre as well as the centre of government, and the four main highways of Zambia head...

, Zambia. She was the chairperson of FEMNET

FEMNET

FEMNET, also called the African Women's Development and Communication Network, is an organization established in 1998 to promote women's development in Africa....

 between 1997 and 2003.
She is the author of the Longwe Framework for Gender Analysis.
Longwe describes herself as a radical feminist activist.

Early struggles

When Longwe was a young secondary school teacher the government refused to grant her maternity leave.
This violated the government's obligation under an International Labor Organization convention.
Longwe formed a lobbying group that succeeded in forcing the government to introduce maternity leave for teachers in 1974.
In another run-in during her career as a teacher, she insisted on wearing trousers to school. The issue was escalated all the way to the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education.
In 1984, Longwe was a founding member of the Zambia Association for Research and Development.
This group played a role in ensuring that the Zambian government ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women is an international convention adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly....

.

Women's Empowerment Framework

Longwe developed the Women's Empowerment Framework, or Longwe Framework, published in 1990.
This Gender analysis

Gender analysis

Gender analysis is a type of socio-economic analysis that uncovers how gender relations affect a development problem. The aim may just be to show that gender relations will probably affect the solution, or to show how they will affect the solution and what could be done...

 framework helps planners understand the practical meaning of women's empowerment and equality, and then to evaluate whether a development initiative supports this empowerment.
The basic premise is that women's development can be viewed in terms of five levels of equality: welfare, access, "conscientization", participation and control. Empowerment is essential at each of these levels. Welfare addresses basic needs, and access addresses ability to use resources such as credit, land and education. "Conscientization" is a key element of the framework: recognition that discrimination creates gender-related problems and women may themselves contribute to this discrimination. With participation, women are equal to men in making decisions, and with control the balance of powers between the genders is equal.

Views and controversy

In 1992, Longwe successfully sued the Intercontinental Hotel when she was refused entry to a bar in the hotel because she was not accompanied by a male. She won the case in the High Court of Zambia on the basis that discrimination against her sex was against the constitution.
Longwe was chairperson of the African Women's Development and Communications Network (FEMNET) between 1997 and 2003.
FEMNET, which was established in 1988, has the goal of assisting NGOs to contribute to women's development, equality and rights, and to provide an infrastructure for information and empowerment.

In 1998 Longwe said that the school system contributes to women's subordination, so lack of schooling should not be seen as a cause for the low socio-economic status of women.
Longwe has been outspken in criticizing lack of progress in programs to reduce the marginalization of women since the 1985 World Conference on Women

World Conference on Women

The World Conference on Women was established in 1975 during the International Women's Year.The most recent conference was the Fourth World Conference on Women....

 in Nairobi

Nairobi

Nairobi is the capital and largest city of Kenya. The city and its surrounding area also forms the Nairobi County. The name "Nairobi" comes from the Maasai phrase Enkare Nyirobi, which translates to "the place of cool waters". However, it is popularly known as the "Green City in the Sun" and is...

.
She has said "Gender policies have a strange tendency to 'evaporate' within international development agencies".
She talks of the "patriarchal cooking pot ... filled with patriarchal bias, implicit in the agency's values, ideology, development theory, organizational systems and procedures".
Her views on roadblocks have been criticized by workers in the Oxfam

Oxfam

Oxfam is an international confederation of 15 organizations working in 98 countries worldwide to find lasting solutions to poverty and related injustice around the world. In all Oxfam’s actions, the ultimate goal is to enable people to exercise their rights and manage their own lives...

agency as being too extreme.

Longwe was awarded the 2003 Africa Prize for Leadership.

Sources

|url=http://www.thp.org/what_we_do_key_initiatives/honoring_africa_leadership/prizes_recent/2003/sara_longwe
|title=Remarks by Sara Longwe
|publisher=The Hunger Project
|accessdate=2011-09-23}}
|url=http://www.apcwomen.org/news/profile_ict_champion_sara_hlupekile_longwe
|title=Profile of an ICT Champion: Sara Hlupekile Longwe
|publisher=ICT
|date=16 July, 2007
|accessdate=2011-09-22}}
|url=http://www.thp.org/what_we_do/key_initiatives/honoring_africa_leadership/laureate_list/sara_longwe
|publisher=The Hunger Project
|title=Sara Longwe 2003 Africa Prize Laureate
|accessdate=2011-09-23}}