It is in the home that gender inequality is at its most powerful and sometimes most hidden. Positive fatherhood therefore plays an important part in challenging the intergenerational transmission of damaging stereotypes and power relations.

More commitment must be demonstrated to strengthening father roles and supporting men to realise their potential to facilitate their children’s attitudes and, as men, heal themselves from damaging and restrictive negative gender roles.

It seems simple to say that men need to play an integral part in development and that the biggest role they can play is in better supporting their children – yet, this is a stark reality that many people, including many gender activists and childcare professionals, don’t want to face up to.

Years of eulogising and romanticising the mother-child relationship, important as it is, and ignoring men as fathers and co-parents, has damaged the environment of care for children and put the whole onus of child raising unfairly on women.

The message given to most men is that they don’t count when it comes to their value in society, in childrearing and, consequently, in many development agencies’ work around improving childhood outcomes.

To give some examples: a major work on ‘Reconceptualising the Family in a Changing Southern Africa’, published in 2001 by Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA), does not mention fatherhood once, in 250 pages of closely argued statistics and analysis, and has no indexical reference to fatherhood at all.

In August 2008, applications were invited for organisations working on gender to access small funds for the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign – in the small print, it said only applications from ‘women’s organisations’ would be accepted.

Men’s organisations wanting to work on tackling perpetrators were simply not welcome to apply. It might be politically correct to prioritise donor support to the ‘victims’ of abuse through women’s organisations, but ignoring work by men to prevent other men engaging in domestic and gender-based violence is nonsensical.

There are eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and a remarkable consensus has emerged between the plethora of United Nations agencies, governments and civil society to throw their weight behind them.

The MDGs seem to be the only game in town, but there is little recognition of the intergenerational link between poverty and the persistent stereotyping of men as obstacles to development rather than partners in solving problems.

For sure, behavioural change is necessary on the part of many men as fathers. The Human Science Research Council (HSRC) has estimated that by the age of eleven, 46 percent of South African children are growing up without a father in their lives. Compliance with maintenance orders for child support is depressingly low in many Southern African countries. All this needs to be challenged vigorously, but we need to ask whether our low societal expectations of fathers are not the underlying reason why some of these phenomena occur.

Societal change is important if we truly want to make an impact on the MDGs for our children. We need to examine institutional prejudices, analyse their commitment to involving fathers in their processes and challenge them to change to a more inclusive parenting model.

UNIFEM and others have criticised, for example, Prevention of [HIV] Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT) programmes, arguing that the real challenge is prevention of parent-to-child transmission. This is a more holistic and gender-sensitive approach to the issue of HIV infections that have to be examined more closely for their inclusion of men in the commitment to an AIDS-free generation.

Supporting fathers’ involvement in the care, education and financial support of their children is important for children and gender equality. But improving fathers’ emotional investment, along with their financial support, is also vital. It’s not just about the cash. If the child loses contact with the father, it also loses the social capital and networks the father has available to help the child develop. These include paternal grandparents and other relatives, friends, workmates, social and educational contacts.

Evidence from around the world increasingly shows that girls who grow up with a concerned father, even where the relationship with the mother has broken down, are less likely to become victims of sexual abuse later, that their psycho-social wellbeing and self image is better and that they will resist men who threaten their physical and psychological integrity.

Boys who grow up with a strong father figure, who does not mistreat women but who treats his partner and his daughters with respect, will be far more likely to transfer these values to their own relationships, with women as equals, and not exercise unfair and often physically violent dominance over the women in their lives.

There is no such thing as a fatherless child. Every child had a father or has a father somewhere, even if they do not live with their father or see their father very often. Many men can play the role of father to a child, including grandfathers, uncles, stepfathers, foster-fathers, older brothers, cousins or family friends.

African Fathers recently completed research in several townships in South Africa, including Soweto and Orange Farm in the Free State, about what children want from their fathers. It was amazing to see what a powerful role fathers play in the imagination of young children. Many told us of their rich relationships with their dads, but sadly, their teachers would tell us afterwards that it was all a fairytale.

The hunger for male nurturing is the unheard voice of many children in a time when old ideas about parental relationships and family are in flux. A child in Africa today may grow up in a family where the father is totally absent, in one where either parent had a child or children before the present relationship produced children or many other models of ‘family’. We need to accept this diversity in the environment of care for our children.

Unfortunately, we are a generation of fathers known for our absence rather than our presence in our African children's lives. Poverty, migration and social expectations of low involvement of men in caring roles all play a part.

We need to encourage men to stay involved with their offspring, to bond earlier with their biological children and care for all children in their lives. It is time to deliver the African fatherhood revolution because, in the end, everyone gains.