Amina J. Mohammed Quotes

We also have a lady who is heading up the Economic Commission for Africa, Vera Songwe, and I think that this is amazing because she’s going to bring a different kind of vision to supporting Africa’s agenda; making sure that we integrate the economy; women’s issues, youth issues, technology, across some of the promises that have been made by African leaders. So, in short, I would say the rubber is about to hit the road and what we need to see is that rhetoric and those frameworks are turned into action.

Our ambition is for each child, as a global citizen, and not just an African citizen, but to bring that whole technology and learning into an environment.

The diversity piece has lost its meaning, because we’ve sort of pigeonholed different parts of our society that are different, and will choose to live differently. And what we need to see is healthy respect, and that these are the threads of our human fabric.

We don’t often look at the fact that root causes can require to be addressed over the long-term. We have to have a balance on what we do in the short term; what can we do in the long-term, and there are some of those low-hanging fruit that give a sense of the possibilities of achieving the longterm objective. But people often want to have things done yesterday.

I think in the short term, as you will have seen in the last six months, the African Union (AU) and the United Nations have defined their frameworks for peace and security. Again, this is to bring more coordination and coherence, a more efficient way of looking at the results, and get them around the continent. What is important here is to align the AU’s Agenda 2063 and the UN’s Agenda 2030. So, in the short term, we are getting the partnership frameworks right especially on roles and responsibilities.

Depending on the context of my means, this may be two children or six children. I think that the bigger, inestimable problem, is the ability to make sure that we can provide for those that come into the world. So, on the population issue, I think there are many dimensions to it and health and life is a very big one.

The policy somersaults that we are feeling right now, I guess they feel them in the United Kingdom, they feel them in countries in Europe now that are going so far right from being so far left. So, it’s important, and then I think that, the more we educate people, the better constituencies we have for engaging. You can’t engage with one person, one vote, when there is quite frankly, a lack of education as to understanding why the vote, and what’s my vote worth? Is it $5? Or is it educational reform, and health services, and things that are my rights, that’s what my vote is. So it’s a little bit of a journey, as you know, the long road to freedom – the road is still being tracked.

I listened to an elder just three days ago, and his eyesight had gone. And all he said was ‘we’re very grateful for what you’ve been able to give us here, but there’s a lot of people you can’t see that haven’t been able to get to this’. And the first thing he said was women and people with disabilities. And it just made me think, ‘wow, this person right now is not talking about can we have more for me and my tribe’, which is what generally gets into a story, he’s been very specific about the people that are being left behind, that we don’t see.

I think people like the Arch and Madiba [Nelson Mandela] always recognized their failings. And so people didn’t have a chance to throw any stones at them. What came out was ‘okay, I’m not perfect, I’m not God, but these are the things that I believe in, these are the things that I will fight for’. So as human beings, what we look to is what they stood for. And I’m not sure today that we give so much grace to leaders. And I think that we have to think and listen to what the leader is saying and doing, rather than judge what’s in the closet.

I do this because I was part of an education system that did this, although I have to say that we had a broader education. But as years have gone on, that curriculum has become loaded. It has lost its core. And I think people are struggling with who they are, and who they are is such a contradiction to people who want us to join this global family.

Even I, as an African, say to people, ‘oo, I’m the United Nations’. That’s their conversation they need to have. I can have a private one as well, as a brother or sister conversation to them. But in this piece here, give them space, because every one of them has baggage, and that baggage is colonial. And many of them are tied to it inextricably, and it’s hard.

However, gender parity is at the top of the agenda in the United Nations and everybody buys into gender parity in terms of aspiration. But the realities of how you move men out of positions in order to make room for women to get gender parity is a tough discourse and it has to start at the entry point – into parliament, into jobs, into institutions.

Wow. We have so many young women and people around the world and around Africa that I come across and I also look up to them. A New African Woman is strong and is at the top of her game in informing and shaping the future of Africa on every level: economically, politically, environmentally, because we are there in all these fields. It is also about African women’s rights and aspirations. African women are closing the gap between the realities of today and our aspirations for tomorrow.

Those are real stories. They are real situations that have to sometimes find their way into the media, into the headlines. Not so much the misery of it, but the way that we can prevent it and then link that to the 1.5 degrees.

And in the DRC, where Goma was once known as the rape capital of the world, they have made strides and put in place people who are responsible for trying to reverse the tide. Working with UN Women and our special representative on sexual violence in conflict, we have seen a huge reduction, although not enough, because we said zero tolerance. However, we need to scale this up and share the best practice.