To say that the rights of women are better understood in South Africa now than they have been at any time in history suggests that there are no more gains to be made, and that women should now be content with their lot. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While women have many rights they did not have even until recently, like reproductive rights and the right to equal pay, they still labour under the burden of patriarchy. It must be said we all do — I subscribe to the idea that men do not only benefit from the patriarchy, but are also burdened and constrained by it in important ways, and it is a yoke we would all be better for throwing off.

That burden is of course heavier for some women — class and race play an important role in creating layers of oppression for queer, black and working-class women. How do we work to mitigate these burdens?

I am for pragmatic answers to these questions. It is of no use to women that slogans are said about equality when women cannot walk the streets safely at night, or more accurately walk about safely in their own homes. Without access to decent reproductive healthcare, being told you have the right to choose isn’t meaningful. How do we make the lived conditions of women better? How do we make sure women have more power when it counts on the issues that matter?

We are all tired of being told we have rights in the Constitution. We cannot eat the Constitution, I concede. However, we can use the Constitution, among other tools, to make those lived conditions better. Rights are only won through struggle, and we will wait forever if we expect decent healthcare, or lighting, or public transport, or any other issue important to women to drop into our laps.

One of the many rights in the Constitution is the right to access information. What is it good for? Well, information is one of the things that differentiates the powerful from the weak. It absolutely must not be the province of an elite who uses it to prescribe outcomes for others. It has to be moved around, the so-called oxygen of democracy.

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Is it enough? No. Information in and of itself is just a bunch of lever arch files, or even worse a collection of PDFs, which will be as much of an obstacle to the achievement of rights as anything else.

But if the right information is in the right hands at the right time, that can be decisive in winning ground on many of the issues that make a difference to women.

Housing is one of the most vexing problems for poor urban women who are primary caregivers of children, who especially need housing with sanitation, in safe areas, close to schools and clinics. Access to information as to who will get housing next is essential to organising locally to demand those women be prioritised.

Poor working-class women face many barriers to getting that kind of information. No money for taxi fare to get to the office of a bureaucrat, no money for data, no time to think and organise, all of these things mitigate against women getting what they need.

Often access to what we call an infomediary is a problem — finding someone who can read and interpret what are often arcane documents written in legalese or jargon. We have to make a particular effort to make sure that information reaches women.

So what’s the plan to get women better access to information?

It’s the role of the Information Regulator to bang on the doors of those who hold information and make it available. If only it were so simple.

Once you plunge into the world of making requests for information, a tangle of bureaucracy awaits. Government is not responsive. Yes there are exceptions, yes there are areas of good practice — but unfortunately for many officials, that request is another drip, drip, drip of the unmet needs of many.

What can we do to change that? Well, we can for example talk to local government and explain their role in making the information people need to be made proactively available. We can educate people on their rights around information. It is not a simple thing, that is true. But it is a necessary part of the whole, without which we cannot continue to advance the rights of women, and the end of patriarchy.

Therefore, as we commemorate September as the Right to Information Month we must also continue the fight to empower women and marginalised groups in the usage of this fundamental human right. DM