ECA mourns the passing of former director and women’s rights champion Margaret Snyder

Abstract

The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Vera Songwe, has expressed profound sadness at the passing of a former ECA director and a stalwart of women’s rights, Margaret C. Snyder. Ms Snyder died on 26 January 2021 after a brief illness. She was 91. Ms. Snyder began her extraordinary career at the ECA in 1971 where she served as the first director of the African Training and Research Center for Women. Over the years, she worked tirelessly to improve women’s access to resources and economic opportunities across Africa. She convinced several international donors to earmark funding for women’s economic empowerment in Africa, which strengthened the ECA’s efforts to deliver transformative programmes. Her pioneering efforts included promoting vocational training for women and girls, supporting microcredit for rural women and utilizing data for rights-based economic progress in Africa. In 1978, she left ECA to become the first director of the Voluntary Fund for the UN Decade for Women, and later the founding director of the UN Development Fund for Women (now part of UN Women). Her division at the ECA has over the years been renamed the African Centre for Gender and Development, and is now the Gender, Poverty and Social Policy Division, covering gender issues in the context of eradicating poverty and addressing the numerous challenges women face in the social policy arena.