The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not necessarily those of Breaking Belize News.
By Nuri Muhammad: The women’s movement in Belize is to be congratulated and appreciated. When I use the term movement, I am speaking about a specific energy that emerged in the 1980s. Certainly, we can go back to an earlier period when little recognition was given to women like Cleopatra White, Nurse Seay, Madam Liz, and many other gallant women who made profound contributions to the social development of early Belize.
In the mid-1970s, special attention began to be given internationally to women’s issues. The United Nations declared 1975 as International Women’s Year, followed by the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, from 1976 to 1985.
In Belize, this international emphasis found expression through the work of persons such as Dame Elaine Middleton and later Zee Edgell, and Bert Tucker, who, at the time, was a consultant to Hon. Philip Goldson, then Minister of Social Development under which Women’s Affairs was a part. Tucker, who had extensive experience working with UN agencies coordinated the Belize delegation to the 1985 UN Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. But it was not until after that conference that a truly proactive, non-governmental movement was generated by Belizean women themselves—women like Cynthia Ellis, Cynthia Pitts, Diane Haylock, Dorla Bowman, the late Regina Martinez, and others.
These women helped fuel a movement that brought women’s issues to the forefront of national consciousness. Today, when we look back, we can see the many achievements and the influence that the determined efforts of these pioneering sisters have had on Belize’s development. The early women’s movement contributed to a wide range of progress for women, even though much still remains to be achieved. Their contribution must be recognized, respected, and appreciated.
Belizean women today are noticeably more sensitive to issues that affect them and their children. Women’s and children’s concerns have become the focal point of several national policy initiatives and have helped motivate important legislation. These include the Domestic Violence Act, legal protection for common-law relationships in relation to property rights, the Families and Children Act, and more recently, the proposed Gender Policy and changes to the Criminal Code.
Nevertheless, with progress comes new challenges. While these advancements have been beneficial to women and to society as a whole, they have also raised important questions. One such question is the growing imbalance between our qualified young women and our qualified young men. We appear to be producing more educationally qualified women than men, especially at the higher levels of education.
The official Belize education statistics show that for 2023/2024, females made up 6,254 of Belize’s 9,819 tertiary students, while males made up only 3,565. In other words, females represented almost two-thirds of tertiary enrollment. At the university level, the imbalance was even more striking: 3,509 females compared to 1,704 males. The same pattern appears in tertiary graduation. In 2022/2023, Belize produced 1,458 female tertiary graduates compared to 836 male graduates. This means that for every 100 female tertiary graduates, there were only about 57 male graduates. Like Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean, Belize is clearly seeing a widening gap in academically prepared young men when compared to young women.
Young women also appear to be better positioned to take advantage of the new economy—an economy based more on knowledge, discipline, communication, organization, and skill than on physical strength.
Of course, as things presently exist in Belize, men still hold many advantages. Our economy continues to depend heavily on labor in construction, agriculture, security, and other physically demanding sectors. The playing field is also still not level. Too often, it remains a matter of who you know rather than what you know. But as the economy expands to include tourism, eco-tourism, financial services, information services, small business development, administration, hospitality, and professional services, these are sectors where our young women are increasingly equal to, and in some cases better prepared than, our young men.
As we observe the academic and professional advancement of our young women, we are also witnessing the increasing marginalization of many young men, especially young Black men. This is not just an impression; it shows up in the official figures.
In 2024/2025, the secondary school net enrollment rate was 65.7 percent for males compared to 72.3 percent for females. The secondary school completion rate also shows the same problem. In 2022, only 68.6 percent of males completed secondary school compared to 79.2 percent of females.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Belize Crime Observatory reported that as of June 30, 2025, there were 1,250 inmates at the Belize Central Prison. Of these, 814 convicted inmates were males and only 16 were females. Among remanded inmates, 412 were males and only 8 were females. That means males made up approximately 98 percent of the prison population. This is what male marginalization looks like in hard figures: fewer males completing and advancing in education, and overwhelming numbers of males falling into the criminal justice system (police, courts, prison).
There is now, generally speaking, greater sensitivity to the rights and advancement of women in our society. A sustained four decades of empowerment, advocacy, training, and self-awareness directed toward women and girls has generated a higher level of awareness among women. One result is that young women are now equally or more educationally prepared than young men, especially at the tertiary level.
One can only imagine what might have happened if a similar sustained period of focused training, mentoring, discipline, purpose, emotional development, fatherhood preparation, entrepreneurship, and cultural grounding had been directed toward men and boys.
So the question is not whether women should have advanced. They should have. Their advancement was necessary, overdue, beneficial to the nation, and worthy of appreciation. The deeper question is this: while women were organizing, advocating, training, and uplifting each other, where were the men?
What stopped men from organizing around our own challenges? Did we even recognize, at the time of independence, that our traditional role was changing? Did we assume that because men historically held power, boys would automatically become responsible men? Did we confuse male privilege with male preparation? Did we think that because men were visible in politics, religion, business, and public life, our boys were being properly formed?
And what of the international development agencies? Women and girls were targeted, trained, protected, encouraged, organized, and empowered. Men and boys were not. UNICEF’s formal mandate may have been children, but in practice in Belize, men and boys were almost never engaged with the same urgency, structure, or sustained developmental attention. They were treated as if their growth into responsible manhood would happen automatically. It did not.
That is important evidence for the argument. Belize developed institutional machinery around women, girls, and gender equality: the National Women’s Commission, the Women and Family Services Department, Gender Focal Points, gender policy, gender-based violence action plans, gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting discussions, and UN, UNDP, UNICEF, and UNFPA technical support. This machinery was built around women/girls and gender equality, through policy influenced primarily by UNICEF and other international development agencies. I have not yet seen a comparable four-decade structure for boys and men, much less for Black boys and men. No Men’s Commission, no Men’s Department. The very idea seems foreign.
Across the wider Caribbean, men and boys were included, but mainly as props in a women-and-girls protection agenda, not as a development population with our own crisis, our own budget, our own institutions, and our own long-term transformation plan. We were often engaged as fathers, partners, community actors, or “agents of change” in programmes designed around the protection and advancement of women and girls. We were props, lets be real.
But where was the comparable Caribbean-wide development agenda for boys and men? Where was the serious regional plan to deal with male academic failure, male unemployment, male violence, male imprisonment, fatherlessness, poor emotional development, and the crisis of manhood?
This cannot be treated as a simple oversight. UNICEF, UNDP, UNFPA, and the wider United Nations system are not careless institutions. They are staffed by highly trained people, researchers, planners, economists, sociologists, and development experts. They know the history of Belize and the Caribbean. They know the legacy of slavery, colonialism, fatherlessness, educational exclusion, unemployment, street culture, prison, and the historic dislocation of Black men. They had to know what was missing. Therefore, the question must be asked directly: why was so much international development energy directed toward the empowerment of women and girls, while no comparable programme, budget, institutional machinery, or long-term transformation plan was built for Black boys and men?
Was this merely a blind spot in development thinking, or was it the result of an ideological framework that saw males only as holders of privilege, perpetrators of violence, or obstacles to women’s advancement, rather than as wounded human beings also in need of development, discipline, healing, education, and social reconstruction?
If international agencies had the foresight to understand that empowering women would transform families, communities, and nations, why did they not also have the foresight to understand that leaving boys and men undeveloped would create conflict, resentment, family instability, school failure, crime, imprisonment, and social breakdown down the road?
The issue is not whether women and girls deserved support. They did. The issue is whether four decades of international development resources created an imbalance by building institutions, policies, advocacy networks, and empowerment systems for females, while assuming that boys and men—especially Black boys and men—would somehow develop themselves. The Belize prison, school completion, and tertiary education figures suggest that they did not.
Most importantly, could we as men have laid a stronger foundation for our sons and younger brothers? Could fathers, teachers, imams, pastors, coaches, politicians, business owners, and community leaders have built a serious movement for male responsibility, discipline, education, emotional maturity, and productive manhood? Is that not the task in front of us now? Do we have to wait for UNICEF or some other agency to take up the challenge
That is the painful truth we must now confront when we answer the question: WHY WERE MEN LEFT BEHIND?
The post Development activist Nuri Muhammad asks: Why were men left behind? appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not necessarily those of Breaking Belize News. By Nuri Muhammad: The women’s movement in Belize is to be congratulated and appreciated. When I use the term movement, I am speaking about a specific energy that emerged in the 1980s. Certainly, we can go back
The post Development activist Nuri Muhammad asks: Why were men left behind? appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.