Sunday was the 21^st anniversary celebrating women in the church here in Burkina Faso.  The service was 3-1/2 hours long with lots of singing, dancing, and acknowledgement of women, all organized and led by women.  Each year they commission a special fabric for the event and make their skirts and dresses out of it.  They wrote special songs and did a great skit on being blessed by God but then turning around and not treating others with the same love.  It was a joyous service.  As I watched, the importance of the day for these women really hit me. 

Amnesty International did a study on women in Burkina Faso in 2010.  Here are some of their findings:

Unmarried women are seen as ill-fated and of little worth. Married women without children face discrimination and are at risk of being abandoned or rejected by their husbands and in-laws. There are heavy cultural pressures from the community on women to have many children, seen as a sign of wealth, particularly in rural areas.

Although women have equal status under the law, in practice most are subordinate to the men in their lives and are unable to make key decisions, including the timing and spacing of their pregnancies. Women are embedded in a vicious circle with little access to education or to information on sexual and reproductive rights, and are subject to early marriages, female genital mutilation and polygamy as well as being expected to work long hours while pregnant or after childbirth.

Women are well aware of the dangers of pregnancy, as nearly everyone knows a relative or friend who died or suffered complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Several women told Amnesty International that young girls in rural areas used to wish each other "not to have the misfortune of being pregnant".

Women in Burkina Faso

• Every year, more than 2,000 women die in Burkina Faso from complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
• In 2007, the literacy rate for women and girls was only 21 per cent, compared to 36.7 per cent for men and boys.
• In rural areas the fertility rate is 6.9 children per woman, as compared with 3.7 in urban areas. The national average is 6.2.
• Young women in rural areas are more likely to bear children, with 157 per thousand rural adolescents becoming mothers, compared with 64 per thousand in urban areas.

Statistics taken from Giving LIfe, Risking Death - Maternal Mortality in Burkina Faso (pdf 2.34MB) a report by Amnesty International.  http://www.amnesty.org.au/poverty/comments/22437/

It is wonderful to see the church in Burkina Faso playing such a dynamic role in acknowledging and changing the status and worth of women.