Sister woman have you heard?

... so here I am in Johannesburg. Just the name of the place is so loaded, it´s weird to actually be here. My colleagues and I are meeting South Africans who are working on gender budgeting. I won´t go into what that is, not least because Í´m only just getting my head round it, but the South African government has a far more explicit commitment to gender equality than does our own, and one of the reasons for that is, they say, because they could start afresh ten years ago when democracy was won.

It´s unbelievable that it was only ten years ago. I can´t imagine what it must have been like here before that.

But even so, we are learning that you have to keep on keeping on. A long term activist said to us yesterday, "when the President talks about gender equality, it´s not as if he has absorbed it from the air".

joella