Seychelles supports Doha ‘Call to Action’ to empower families |24 April 2014

“The family unit is the basic social foundation of any society. It provides emotional, intellectual and social stability. When families are strong, society is strong. When families are weak, societies begin to break down.”

This is the gist of the message Designated Minister Vincent Meriton, who is responsible for social affairs, community development and sports, delivered as he led discussion in the ‘Families Matter’ plenary session at the international conference on families held in Doha, Qatar, last week.

The conference on ‘Empowering Families: A Pathway to Development’ was held under the patronage of H.H. Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser, chairperson of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, the Doha International Family Institute (DIFI).

The conference took place on April 16-17 at the Qatar National Convention Centre to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the International Year of the Family.

Highlighting Seychelles’ human development ranking: first in Africa and 46th out of 187 countries, the minister said families have made progress in Seychelles.

He went on to add that the protection of families as the natural and fundamental element of society is enshrined in the Constitution of Seychelles.

“However, the challenge for us similarly to other parts of the world and where this forum is important is that we need the next generation of policies that consider the challenges facing families.

 Our challenges include the decrease in extended families and family support networks, the continued rise in female headed families, the ageing population and the effects of development and globalisation,” Minister Meriton pointed out.

He noted that the national plan of action on social renaissance whose principal goal is to “uphold the family as the central unit of society”, was the result of government’s policies to revolutionise the social landscape of the country.

“My ministry, faithful to its motto ‘empowering families,’ is mandated to empower individuals, reduce dependency and restore social functioning,” he said.

Minister Meriton whose strong views about the need to continue safeguarding the families were also aired on Qatar Francophone Radio Oryx FM, has described the conference as fruitful, and expressed support for the 10 recommendations in the Doha Call for Action.

“It was a highly dynamic conference in which all countries who took part agreed to continue to give visibility to the role of families and keep them at the centre of development. The Doha Call of Action strikes close to the heart of our own social policies and gives us renewed impetus to continue working relentlessly to protect and strengthen families and offer better services,” he said.

He added that government will ensure that appropriate services and programmes are in place but the civil society, families and individuals have an equally important role to play to be receptive of the services being offered.

The Doha Call of Action urges governments to empower and enable families to contribute to development by taking the following actions:

1. Develop comprehensive and coherent policies, integrate cross-sectorial approach to support family stability and establish/strengthen a national mechanism to develop family-oriented policies and programmes and allocate adequate human and financial resources to implement, monitor and evaluate them;

2. Promote gender equality and the empowerment of women, reform discriminatory laws and policies, particularly family laws, and enact legislations to end child marriage and violence against women;
 
3. Recognise the contribution and responsibility of men to families, develop policies to address the impact of the absence of males/fathers on family wellbeing and promote active fatherhood;

4. Focus on poverty alleviation strategies on the family as a unit and acknowledge that family breakdown can be both a root cause and an effect of poverty and its prevention is a priority;

5. Adopt policies to ensure work-family balance, so that the responsibilities of parenting and maintaining families do not fall primarily on women and collaborate with the private sector to protect and support workers with family responsibilities;

6. Value important contributions of all generations within the family, design and implement policies to strengthen intergenerational solidarity and partnerships and promote healthy intra-family relations;

7. Ensure the systematic collection of data and statistics on family wellbeing and collaborate on good practice exchange at national, regional and international levels;

8. Develop and implement family focused policies and interventions to strengthen and support families in vulnerable situations (such as conflict, natural disasters and health epidemics including HIV/Aids and malaria);

9. Create an enabling environment for a meaningful contribution of civil society organisations in the design, implementation and monitoring of family policies and programs and remove barriers to the establishment, work and funding of non-governmental organisations;

10. Acknowledge that families are at the centre of sustainable development and ensure that families are an integral part of the post-2015 development agenda.