Introduction

• Author: Gemma Tang Nain
• Pages: 19-24

INTRODUCTION

This publication was conceived as part of the CARICOM Secretariat’s

contribution to the Beijing +5 process in 2000 and is intended to provide

an update on the status of women in the CARICOM Region. The document

‘Towards Equity in Development: A Report on the Status of Women in

Sixteen Commonwealth Countries’ had been prepared for the Beijing

Conference in 1995 and it was considered important to assess what progress

had been made in the Region in the post-Beijing period.

The material presented covers the CARICOM member states and

associate member states.1 The region, as is well documented, shares a

common history of slavery, colonialism and indentureship and encompasses

several different ethnic and cultural groups including indigenous peoples

and persons of African, Chinese, European and Indian descent. The Region

is made up predominantly of small island developing states with the

significant exception of Belize, Guyana and Suriname which are mainland

territories covering large areas of land but with very small populations

relative to their size. The countries also have similar economies with heavy

reliance on one or two major export products (notably captured by Lloyd

Best as plantation economies) and most share a common political system

derived from the British Westminster model.

Governments of CARICOM countries demonstrated an interest in

improving the status of women as early as the first half of the 1970s with

the inclusion of this issue in the Treaty of Chaguaramas (1973) and the

establishment by Jamaica of the first Bureau of Women’s Affairs in the

Region. With the declaration by the United Nations of 1975 as the

International Year of the Woman, followed by the Decade for Women

(1976-1985), more CARICOM countries established such bureaux so that