Сельские женщины: достижение воздействия гендерных преобразований
In March 2018, at the 62nd Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), once again the spotlight will be turned on to address the challenges and opportunities rural women and girls face.
This online discussion, led by FAO with IFAD, UN Women and WFP, invites you to reflect on the current understanding of gender dynamics of rural livelihoods and share information, views and experiences in preparation for CSW62. The main objective is to highlight critical gaps and priority areas for action on how to accelerate gender transformative impacts for rural women. The discussion will focus on three principal questions, presented below, over the next three weeks.
Changing context of rural livelihoods
Moving forward from the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995, the needs and priorities of rural women have been firmly on the development agenda and significant progress has been made. Many women have gained improved access to markets, information, financial services, greater engagement with the private sector, skills development, energy, labour-saving technologies and remittances, and some became successful entrepreneurs, leaders in the community and more respected in their homes. Women fulfil important roles throughout agrifood value chains, and play essential roles in food security and nutrition, and in the management of natural resources.
Nevertheless, the lives of many rural women remain unchanged. They work long hours combining productive work with unpaid care and domestic tasks, and their empowerment opportunities are constrained by limited security over land and an inability to borrow. Too often rural women cannot benefit from improved technologies, are exposed to the risks of climate change, and experience significant post-harvest losses. Their lives are also challenged by rapid population growth results in the youth bulge, out migration, an aging rural population and degraded natural resources.
Gender transformative approaches
To achieve the SDGs and “leave no one behind”, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development calls for transformational change, in countries and at all levels. There is growing recognition that the standard approaches to addressing gender inequalities have often not been enough. Many gender mainstreaming initiatives have focused on empowering women economically – ensuring they have access to inputs, technical advice and markets, and have a voice in decision-making bodies and rural institutions – which contribute to short-term productivity gains. However, to enjoy long-term sustainable benefits, women want not only be able to work productively and have a voice in how the income they generate is spent. They want the quality of their lives to be improved, reduce the time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, and be free from gender-based violence.
More needs to be done – and in a different way - to achieve lasting benefits for improving the quality of life for rural women and their families. This involves moving beyond treating the symptoms of gender inequality, such as the unequal access to resources and benefits, to addressing the underlying causes deeply rooted in gender norms and behaviours, power relations and social institutions.
Question 1: What are the main challenges rural women and girls are facing today?
- The context of rural livelihoods has changed significantly during the past 20 years, with significant implications for rural women. Is our understanding of the challenges rural women and girls are facing still up-to-date?
- How do the needs and priorities of rural women differ based on their age, education, household composition, resource base and cultural context?
- How do some rural women manage to move forward and become successful entrepreneurs, whereas others are trapped in a life of food insecurity and poverty?
Question 2: Are we using the right approaches and policies to close the gender gap?
- How can the policy gap be closed? Most countries have ratified international and regional instruments to protect and enhance women’s rights. Yet, in many countries there is a gap between the policy framework on gender and what actually gets delivered, including the failure to mainstream gender considerations into other policy frameworks, such as food security and nutrition policies.
- Why is it so challenging to convince the private sector to engage with rural women as economic actors, despite the evidence demonstrating that this generates profitable outcomes?
- As we approach 2020, what are the emerging economic opportunities for rural women? Are current capacity development programmes enhancing the right set of skills for rural women and girls? How can we better update them?
Question 3: How can we best achieve gender transformative impacts?
- What can be done to strengthen women’s voice and wellbeing in the household and the community? Many initiatives focus on empowering women in their productive role and as members and leaders of producer and community groups. While they become empowered in the public space, this does not necessarily translate into improved household dynamics and quality of life.
- Has sufficient attention been paid in engaging men and boys for positive behavioural change? Do they understand the links between gender roles and inequalities, and their impact on the productivity and wellbeing of their households? Are their needs being overlooked, resulting in their marginalisation and disengagement from household development?
- What approaches have proved successful to address deeply rooted gender norms, power relations and social institutions?
Thank you and I look forward to a stimulating discussion,
Clare Bishop
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This is an important discussion in preparation for the CSW in March 2018. On behalf of LANSA (Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia), we had organised an FSN Forum last year (130) on Transforming gender relations in agriculture through women’s empowerment: benefits, challenges and trade-offs for improving nutrition outcomes. We had a very interesting discussion around similar issues and I will not repeat the points that emerged, but do look at the summary report attached.
While the feminisation of agriculture and agricultural labour is recognised in many countries of the world, women are still not adequately supported to perform these roles, their needs and interests not given priority attention within agricultural policies, research and extension services. Recognition of women's economic contributions to agriculture and provision of equal entitlements are central to protecting their rights and helping them overcome disadvantage. Explicit legal recognition as farmers with equal entitlements as men is a precondition to removing inequalities in access to resources and services.
An important issue that has emerged in our research is women's time burdens, especially during peak agricultural seasons, when they end up working close to 14 hours a day, in agriculture and domestic work. As agricultural work needs to be done, given the seasonal nature of work cycles, women's care-work is squeezed, with negative implications for their own health and that of their children. We find a particular trade off between agricultural work and care of the young child, contributing to the persistence of nutritional deprivation intergenerationally.
Apart from ensuring equal productive entitlements, it is therefore also necessary to support women's reproductive and care work. This can be done through public investments to reduce rural women's drudgery by provision of basic infrastructure as well as time and drudgery reducing technologies. Social protection programmes need to pay attention to increasing women's choices, especially with respect to the season work-care time trade-offs. Further, alongside encouraging men to share care responsibilities, states also need to ensure the provision of reliable and good quality facilities for child care and feeding, especially during the peak agricultural seasons. This is because amongst the poorest, men often end up migrating to towns to earn a living, and given their absence from rural areas, cannot share women's work burdens.
Women problem has been the central issue of social and economic field both here and abroad. Women's empowerment is a participatory process, is extended free choice and the ability of an action, it means the right of control and decision-making in all aspects of political, economic, cultural, social and other rights are transferred to those who are denied the right to control the hands of women, to enhance social development resources and the decision and force. Measurement is a controversial content in the study of women’s empowerment. At present, methods for measuring empowerment include Gender Development Index (GDI), Gender Equity Measurement (GEM), quantitative investigation, ethnographic survey, focus group interview and case study.
Agricultural women's empowerment index (WEAI) is by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Oxford poverty and human development project (OPHI) joint development, it is to measure the weight status of Ministry of agriculture the first comprehensive, comprehensive, standard and direct measurement of women. The index consists of two parts, namely, the 5 dimensions of agricultural empowerment (5DE) and the gender difference index (GPI), with weights of 90% and 10% respectively.
According to the construction method of adjusted WEAI, we practiced a program from the "impact assessment of agricultural comprehensive development projects in poor areas of Inner Mongolia" supported by the international agricultural development fund in 2014. The project of data acquisition by household questionnaire structure mainly relates to Inner Mongolia Wulanchabu Chayouqian flag, chayouzhongqi, Chayouhouqi, Siziwangqi, Shangdu County, Huade County, Xinghe County, Liangcheng County, Zhuozi County, a total of 9 counties, a total of 900 households were.According to the research, sample impoverished county women's empowerment index increased from 0.794 in 2008 to 0.835 in 2014, an increase of 11.5%; the proportion of women empowerment is not also declined, falling from 25.3% in 2008 to 20.1% in 2014, down 25.9%. The women's empowerment index decomposition, the lack of control of agricultural production decisions and productive resources are the main factors that leading to women’s empowerment is insufficiency; in addition, the credit ability also affect women's empowerment. The three indicators of the contribution rate has greatly exceeded the weight reached 20%, 20% and 19.7% respectively, which indicates that the weight status in these three aspects of women than the other declined, so the more the need for intervention to improve women's ability and power. We also examine the influence of women's empowerment on food security. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between women's empowerment and food security, that is to say, in the case of other conditions unchanged, the more women’s empowerment, the higher their food security.
Please see the research paper attached [Chinese only].
I would like to build on Peter Mbuchi's comments, which focus on the need to work with both men and women in order to attain gender transformative impacts. My colleague, Talip Kilic, and I have been looking at the impacts of increasing both women's empowerment per se, and of cooperation within the household -- through joint decision-making -- in rural Malawi. We found that greater women's empowerment can lead to increased household income per capita, but that collective action led to much larger increases in household income and consumption per capita as well. Our full results can be found in our working paper here: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/26482. Looking at the literature, we found very little empirical research on how cooperation within the household impacts key welfare outcomes for household members for rural households in developing countries, in fact, we found just one article that found a positive impact of couple's training on the ability of spouse's to reach cooperative outcomes in experimental games settings (Lecoutere and Jassogne, 2016). However, there is a larger literature on family-run businesses in developed countries; this literature often highlights the importance of mechanisms that promote "shared visions" amongst family members in increasing profitability -- a similar argument made by Peter Mbuchi in his comments.
Interestingly, a paper comparing women's empowerment across six countries by Njuki et al. (http://www.care.org/sites/default/files/documents/pathways-global-baseline-report-2013.pdf) finds that though there is absolutely room for increasing women's empowerment in Malawi, women in Malawi tend to be more empowered than their counterparts in all five of the other countries included in that study. This raises the question of whether promoting cooperation in the household is more likely to generate positive results when women's empowerment is also "high enough", or whether promoting cooperation can itself lead to greater women's empowerment.
We expect that household welfare outcomes for all members to be best when there is both women's empowerment per se as well as cooperation amongst family members. It seems like a very good time to include consideration of cooperation within the household in addition to women's empowerment. And, because empirical evidence is scarce, learning from current project approaches -- such as the Family Action Learning System -- as well as generating more evidence from empirical research could lead to real changes in the way we structure projects and policies to address both women as individuals and women as family members, in order to reach transformational changes that improve everyone's welfare.
Cheers,
Nancy
Many measurers are taken by the Government of India to empower women in the household for livelihood security.The ration cards issued to each house hold in Kerala(India) are in the name of eldest women in the house and ration card carries the pass port size photograph of the owner women.There are several incentives to self help women groups.Recently the Cochin Metro opened with a lot of fanfare, women are the piolets and transgenders are given jobs in the metro train.Harassment against women is treated as a non-bailable offence.Despite all these, representation in the powerful assembly and in the state cabinet is abysmally low.At grass root Panchayat level there are legally reserved wards, blocks and Panchayats where women are the elected members/Presidents.There are visible improvement in the literacy levels of women.There are all exclusive women magazines carrying success stories of women in many walks of life.
English translation below
La lutte des femmes rurales pour faire évoluer favorablement les inégalités entre les sexes est une limite rattachée à la lutte contre la pauvreté. Car, la pauvreté est plus rurale et plus féminine aujourd’hui. L’erreur commise à ce jour est de développer des actions d’intervention sans la prise en compte de l’hétérogénéité de la population pauvre (formes de pauvreté). Les pauvres ne sont pas les mêmes. Et pour être efficaces, les actions d’intervention doivent en tenir compte. Ce qui n’est pas encore le cas.
En définitive, les problèmes des femmes sont rattachés aux faits qui font que la pauvreté chronique frappe plus les ménages dirigés par les femmes que les autres. La question n’est pas à mon avis une question d’autonomisation des femmes ; une notion que je n’ai souvent pas aimée, parce que la cohésion des ménages tient à l’interdépendance entre l’homme et son épouse. Il ne s’agit donc pas de renforcer la femme contre son époux, mais surtout de viabiliser davantage les ménages et de sauver les femmes, notamment celles en situation de chefs de ménage. Je tire ces déductions des travaux de thèse que j’ai effectués sur la dynamique de pauvreté. Il s’est dégagé que le taux de pauvreté chronique est beaucoup plus élevé au sein des ménages dirigés par les femmes qu’au sein des ménages dirigés par les hommes : 47,1 % contre 25,7 %. Toute la lutte pour la promotion de la femme pour la réduction des inégalités de genre est une lutte contre la pauvreté chronique. Il s’agit d’une approche technique et fondamentale qui a toujours manqué à ce jour. La pauvreté chronique relève de dispositions structurelles économiques et socioculturelles qui affectent négativement la capacité de production des ménages. C’est alors que je dégageais la nécessité de prendre des mesures structurelles telles que la prise en charge sociale de la santé, la dotation en actifs des ménages et la promotion des femmes chefs de ménage. Un article sur le genre et la pauvreté chronique est disponible en ligne : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259527591_Genre_et_pauvrete_chronique_en_milieu_rural_au_Benin
The struggle of rural women for a favorable outcome to gender inequalities is a constraint linked to the fight against poverty. For poverty today is more than ever rural and more affecting women. Up until now the mistake committed has been to develop interventions without taking into account the heterogeneous nature of the poor population (different kinds of poverty); the poor are not all the same. And to have any effect the interventions ought to be taking this fact into account, which so far is not the case.
In the final analysis, women's problems are tied to facts that cause chronic poverty to impact more on households headed by women than others. The question is not in my view a question of women's autonomy; a notion that I have never really liked because households are held together by the interdependence between the man and his spouse. It is not therefore about reinforcing the woman against her spouse, but mainly about making the households more viable and coming to the aid of women, in particular those assuming the role of head of the family. I have drawn these conclusions from work carried out in connection with my thesis on the dynamic of poverty. It is clear that the chronic poverty rate is higher in households where a woman is head than in those families where the man is head: 47.1% versus 25.7%. The whole struggle for the promotion of women in order to reduce gender inequalities is really a fight against chronic poverty. It is a question of a technical and fundamental approach which has until now always been missing. Chronic poverty arises from the economic and structural dispositions that negatively affect the productive capacity of households. This is why I have distinguished the need to take structural measures such as accepting the social cost of health care, allocation of assets to households and the promotion of women as heads of families. An article on gender and chronic poverty is available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259527591_Genre_et_pauvrete_chronique_en_milieu_rural_au_Benin.
Starting from no or little encouragement from families, improper policies, unequal opportunities, lack of literacy, education, lack of skilling programmes for women and lack of finanacial support, most of the women are trapped in a life of food insecurity and poverty, while only a few rural women manage to move forward and become successful entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurship programmes are focussed mostly on men, while women find them engaged in menial jobs having no potential to turn them into entrepreneurs. The formal participation of women in development oriented meetings are also very limited. Women need- skilling, more formal participation, policies favouring their enhanced role in developmental activities, programmes. From the early age they need mentoring for entrepreneurship and importance of being independent to be able to stand on their own.May be in schools courses are introduced to mentor them on economic independence and value of income generating skills to earn one's own livelihood. The families need also programmes to motivate them to encourgage female members of the households to acquire skills to earn income and have finanacial independence to reduce burden on families. The Finanacial institution should come forward to support skilling programmes for women and helping in setting up ventures by women since women often lack colletrals land titles being not in their names. I find women Dairy Cooperative programme of NDDB in India as one wonderful initiative (http://nddb.coop/services/cooperative/enhancewomen) owards empowering women. Likewise, we need programmes to skill, support, handhold rural women so that they can stand on their own through economic activity undertaken by them. I had once an opportunity to evalauate Women Dairy Cooperatives established under the programme, "Support to Training and Employment Programme for Women (STEP)" of Ministry of women & Child Development in India (http://wcd.nic.in/schemes/support-training-and-employment-programme-women-step). I found it very beneficial for women who could learn skills and empower themselves finanacially and socially. Such programmes implemented in the right spirit can be the real game changer.
Although all projects targeted women according to gender maistreaming policy, still they are facing economic and socail problems; they are illiterate and they dont have finance to create business.
I propose if the projects specify certain component target women only, they will benefit more and let women get more access to the projects opportunities.
Г-жа Clare Bishop
Feedback from the facilitator of the online discussion
Dear all,
Thank you to the early contributors for getting the discussion off to an interesting start.
The main challenge is to secure a mindset shift which several contributors noted: How to help rural women gain self-respect and understanding of their role (Ekaterine Gurgenidze from Georgia)? How to encourage young girls to know how important they are to society (Byansi Hamidu from Tanzania)? How to overcome the traditional division of work between women and men, with respect to productive tasks (Mahesh Chander from India) and reproductive and care tasks (Marcela Ballara from Chile)? How to move on from the ‘Technical know who’, for example, where the private sector uses men to solve women’s problems, rather than letting women work to solve their own challenges (Byansi Hamidu from Tanzania)?
Several pathways for change have been identified, including:
- The crucial role of education and training (especially for non-agricultural rural work) in empowering women to look for more skilled opportunities (Bertha Yiberla Yenwo from Cameroon, Marcela Ballara from Chile, Mahesh Chander from India, Dr. Amanullah from Pakistan, Byansi Hamidu from Tanzania);
- ICTs – and in particular smart phones with internet access – are also a game changer. As noted in India, social media are challenging social norms and encouraging women to be more assertive even though, at present, girls have less access to phones than boys.
- The feminisation of rural areas, as a result of male outmigration, is enabling women to be recognised as the principal decision-makers and actors in the rural areas (Marcela Ballara from Chile and Kala Koyu from Nepal).
- The growing agribusiness sector could engage more with women, working in groups to make their voice heard and supported by extension services reaching out to women and girls (Byansi Hamidu from Tanzania).
- The importance of an enabling policy environment, such as the Rural Women's Dialogue Table in Chile, which focused on the integration of rural women into economic activity.
But change is not without its challenges. Men can feel uncomfortable when traditional roles are challenged (Mahesh Chander from India) while women left to manage households in areas of male outmigration can be subject to negative public scrutiny and labelling which are degrading and demoralising (Kala Koyu from Nepal).
Working with both men and women can overcome some of this backlash to change and result in gender transformative impacts. The Gender Action Learning System (GALS) encourages men and women to have common visions at household level and to analyse family issues that can hinder the achievement of these visions (Mbuchi Peter from Kenya). Through enabling both women and men to appreciate the benefits of more equitable approaches, the productive potential of the family is unlocked.
Please share more examples of working with men and at household/family level to tackle the more fundamental causes of gender inequality.
Clare
Land tenure is crucial to security and overcoming poverty. In an EGM on women's issues held during the process of consultations contributing to the UN Habitat New Urban Agenda, grassroots women and global experts indentified land tenure as paramount to women's security. The recommendations of this EGM included: Institutionalizing land rights for women; creating and instituting policies prohibiting discrimination against women in owning and renting housing; and adopting policies that protect the disenfranchised from commercial land grabs. Grassroots women in Jamaica, Peru and the Philippines gained secure access to land and created a construction training program of low-cost building practices that provided women with economically viable building skills and improved living environments.(1) Other grassroots women in rural areas have organized into groups to create farming collectives and seed banks for control of distribution of local seeds. Their work is dependent on land security.
Parallel to the development of land tenure security is the establishment of legal frameworks that grant and protect these rights. These legal frameworks must be addressed in conjunction with other laws that affect women, such as marriage and inheritance laws. The security of tenure must be protected from generation to generation. And, women must receive education and guidance about their tenure rights, so that they know their rights and may challenge any obstruction of these rights.
In response to the question from Ekaterine Gurgenidze, "How can we help rural women to help with self respect and understand their significant role in community, family and society?"
There are many grassroots women's groups around the world who are organizing, mapping their communities and proposing solutions to challenges they encounter and must overcome. The Huairou Commission has been working for 20 years to support these women, many rural women, and connect them to share their creative solutions through peer to peer exchanges. Having women empower women with similar circumstances works. Meeting women who have overcome similar challenges is empowering and life changing. I think that all organizations should look to the grassroots for input on programs that supported them in transforming cultural role norms.
1. Pritchett, Regina and Jacqueline Leavitt. June 2012. Women.Cities and Economic Empowerment: Lessons from the Expert Group Meeting, Harvard University Expert Group Meeting.
Hello, I'm from Georgia and want to discuss about one gender topic. During the last 20 years the gender issue is becoming more prioritized and important to our government. But the rural women stay in the same women of development as it was 20 years ago.
I have one question for discussion:
How can we help rural women to help with self respect and understand their significant role in community, family and society?
В настоящее время это мероприятие закрыто. Пожалуйста, свяжитесь с [email protected] для получения любой дополнительной информации.