SD : People : Rural Dimensions of Gender-Population Concerns

Posted December 1996

Rural Dimensions of Gender-Population Concerns

by Stella C. Ogbuagu
Senior Officer, Population, Women and Development
Population Programme Service (SDWP)
FAO Women and Population Division

from a report prepared for a workshop on "Gender, Population and Development" organized by UNFPA in association with UNIFEM (New York, 30 September - 3 October 1996)

OVER THE LAST FEW DECADES, many developing countries have advanced the reproductive health and socio-economic conditions of their people (UNFPA, 1995). As shown in Table 1 below, the total fertility rate has dropped from 5.9 in 1970 to 3.5 in 1992 (UNDP, 1995:2). Maternal mortality declined from 450 to 420 deaths per 100,000 live births between 1983 and 1988 (United Nations, 1996a:138). Contraceptive use rate rose for most regions and explains much of the decline in fertility in countries such as Thailand, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Estimated use for the 1960s was 10 percent (United Nations, 1996a quoting United Nations, 1989 and Bongaarts, 1984) and 55 percent use rate was estimated for 1993 indicating much greater use of family planning services. Literacy rates have increased also. All three tiers of the educational system - primary, secondary and tertiary show a narrowing of gender gaps in enrolments from 62, 57 and 41 percent in 1970 to 88, 78 and 70 percent in 1992 respectively.

**Table 1: Selected Indicators of Quality of Life for Women by Region**
	Factors
	Education			Life expectancy		Maternal mortality	Total fertility rate rate		Contraception rate
	1970	1992	F as % of M	1970	1992	1980-92	1970	1993	1986-93
World	-	-	-	54.1	69.4	320	4.8	3.0	58
Industrial countries	-	-	-	74.2	79.4	10	2.4	1.8	-
Developing countries	-	59.3	73	54.4	62.9	351	5.9	3.5	55
Sub-Saharan Africa	-	44.6	66	45.2	52.4	606	6.6	5.8	15
Arab states	15.5	40.7	62	51.1	63.3	294	6.9	4.8	34
East Asia	-	71.0	80	61.9	90.6	92	5.1	1.9	83
South Asia	16.9	34.2	55	47.8	60.2	469	5.9	4.1	41
SE Asia/Pacific	54.4	82.1	90	52.4	65.5	295	5.6	3.1	-
Latin America/Caribbean	67.8	84.1	97	61.7	71.0	189	5.3	1.9	58
Source: United Nations Development Programme, 1995, Human Development Report; United Nations, 1996a, World Population Monitoring 1993. Note: 1970 figures derived from 1992 data based on (1970=100) index.

Overall, life expectancy has increased. For females in all developing regions, it rose from 54.4 years in 1970 to 62.9 years in 1992. All countries with relevant data gained in female life expectancy except Uganda which dropped from 47.6 years in 1970 to 46.2 in 1992 probably because of the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS in combination with economic stresses in that region. UNFPA, in collaboration with governments, United Nations Agencies, some donor organisations, NGOs and other members and organisations of civil society, has enormously contributed to the above successes especially for women. It has gained in stature as "an advocate for human rights including women's rights" (UNFPA, 1995:18).

Constraints to higher achievements

Developing country dimension

Regional figures displayed in Table 1 mask great heterogeneity of experiences between and within regions and countries. While some have progressed toward stabilisation of population like in East Asia, others have suffered reversals in gains in some of the vital indicators of quality of life. For example, 14 developing countries, mainly in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, experienced declines in gains in maternal mortality during the 1970 and 1992 period as shown in Table 2.

**Table 2: Some countries with reversals in maternal mortality (1970-1992)**
	Rates		% decline
	1970	1992
Argentina	139	140	1.0
Jamaica	105	120	12.5
Peru	214	300	28.6
Guatemala	158	200	21.3
Honduras	175	220	20.3
Papua New Guinea	796	900	11.5
Myanmar	130	460	71.8
Egypt	147	270	45.4
Morocco	250	330	24.2
Ghana	553	1000	44.7
Madagascar	127	570	77.7
Malawi	250	400	37.5
Chad	857	960	10.7
Uganda	396	550	28.1
Source: United Nations Development Programme, 1995: 52-54 Note: 1970 figures derived from 1992 based on the index (1970=100)

Though some of the differences in maternal mortality rates over the period could be attributed to improved demographic data collection methods, nonetheless, it shows unacceptably high rates of female life wastage. More importantly, it reflects worsening conditions under which reproduction occurs in developing countries. If data were available for all countries, the number experiencing reversals would, most probably increase. This is a challenge to existing policies and programmes for implementing ICPD and FWCW objectives and POAs. Comparatively, developed and developing countries' reproductive health regimes differ significantly. While Ireland experiences only 2 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, Mali's rate is 2,000 giving a range of 1,998 maternal deaths (UNDP, 1995).

Maternal mortality, as an important index of reproductive health has close association with infant mortality and reflects the state, availability and use of reproductive health facilities, state of nutrition and quality of care. Rise in or even high maternal mortality rate raises questions of the impact of national and international development policies and programmes on gender balancing and gender equity in developing countries particularly on their rural women.

Rural dimension

Rural people especially the women, by the nature of their location and associated differential development vis-à-vis urban residents suffer various disabilities. However, the women are more intensely affected. For, like their urban counterparts, they suffer from general gender-discriminatory practices, inequalities and inequities. They share lower literacy rates, less access to productive resources: land, credits and technology; health and legal services, and decision-making positions. They suffer inadequate recognition of contributions to national development while bearing the brunt of childbearing and rearing, family health care and community activities. In many countries, their burdens have been increased by cuts in the social budgets as governments implement structural adjustment practices.

However, rural conditions including harsher traditional gender division of labour and social restrictions as well as poorer demographic experiences impose greater constraints on rural than urban women. Therefore, rural women have restrictions at two levels. First, as members of the female gender and second, as "rural" female gender. The interaction of these two levels of disadvantage with poor demographic profile presents formidable obstacles to rural women's exercise of their human/women's rights in most spheres of life including education, reproductive health and access to public activities.

Scarcity of rural-gender disaggregated data restrict the extent of analysis. To illustrate, UNDP's efforts in the 1995 Human Development Report to relate rural to urban women's literacy produced only limited results for the above reason. For the 13 developing countries with relevant data, there are wide disparities between rural and urban women's literacy rates (see Table 3). Thailand and the Philippines exhibit the narrowest range (94 and 92 percent respectively). Burkina Faso and Djibouti have the widest disparity (12 and 11 percent respectively).

**Table 3: Rural women's literacy rates (as % of urban women's literacy rates)**
Country	Rate
Djibouti	11
Burkina Faso	12
Mali	28
Egypt	34
Cameroon	44
Honduras	66
Vanuatu	67
Uganda	72
Colombia	81
Ecuador	81
Viet Nam	88
Philippines	92
Thailand	94
Source: "UNDP Human Development Report, 1995"

Education opens a wide range of opportunities to individuals through exposure to new ideas, new ways of perceiving and visualising the world, of advancing self image and of increasing decision-making role in the family. Limitations in education hamper individual advancement and are linked to low status and consequently to high fertility, hesitation to use family planning and greater dependence in widowhood and divorce (Boserup, 1990:58; Jeejeebhoy, 1996:229).

In effect, rural gains have been limited. To advance further in stabilising population as well as in reducing gender inequalities, rural interface with gender and population must be fully explored, understood and integrated into activities for the achievement of ICPD and FWCW goals.

Selected gender-population concerns of rural women

It is estimated that by 1990, 89 percent of the world's 3032 rural people lived in the developing countries. For various reasons, including wars, greater male out-migration, increasing rate of mortality attributable to HIV/AIDS, women preponderate in rural populations. They provide 70 percent of agricultural workers, 60-80 percent of labour for household food production. They are responsible for 100 percent of the processing for basic food stuffs, 80 percent of food storage and transport from farm to village, 90 percent of water and fuelwood for households and 60 percent of the harvesting and marketing activities (FAO- SDWW, 1996). Despite these contributions, 550 million rural women live below the poverty line.

The multi-layered disadvantage of rural women calls for greater attention to some of the relevant issues: differential age at marriage, age difference of spouses, patriarchy, low status, family planning and unmet needs, female-headed households and differential impacts of inequitable world trade and adjustment policies.

Early age at marriage

Early marriage and early age of childbearing were the norm in traditional societies. Currently, for girls in Asia, Africa and Latin America, 18, 16 and 8 percentage respectively marry before age 15 (UNFPA, 1990:127). Generally, women marry earlier than men (18 and 23 years in Nigeria ,for example) and rural women marry even earlier than their urban counterparts (Goody: 1990:127). Gender-biased age at marriage often entails limited schooling, entry into low-paying jobs and early childbearing with its associated reproductive health problems for girls. Studies in Nigeria (Women in Nigeria (WIN): 1985) show that some of these young mothers end up suffering from fistulas (UNFPA, 1995:40). Similar studies are yet to be conducted for boys in the same areas. Constant childbearing coupled with hardwork and low or no education in traditional settings often have adverse effects on the health of both mother and children contributing significantly to their high morbidity and mortality rates (Boserup, 1990).

Spousal age difference

Age differences between spouses can have serious impacts on reproductive choices. Strict adherence to age structure and respect for gerontology produces gender inequalities for young people especially for young wives who usually treat their much older husbands as "fathers" or "masters". Relationship in such cases is asymmetrical, portraying wide divergence in both status and in power and wealth (United Nations, 1996b). The wife depends on her husband for major decisions including decisions on reproductive health matters. The ICPD, in chapter 7 reinforces the 1974 World Population Conference in stating that:

"All couples and individuals have the reproductive right to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have information and means to do so ..." (United Nations, 1975, par. 14(f) and Germain and Kyte, 1995:15). This is to be done without coercion, discrimination and violence. The issue is to what extent gender-based hierarchical relations permit women to participate meaningfully in decision- making processes. In effect, sustainable development would be illusory without empowering interventions such as education, land reform, health care, increase in user-friendly and labour- saving technology, employment opportunities, social security, and enhancement of women's status (Postel, 1996b:91).

Patriarchy

Patriarchal system of traditional society has been identified (Boserup, 1990; McNicoll and Cain, 1990) as an important factor in explaining the impact of gender-population interrelationships on rural residents particularly women. Societies, which are patrilocal often reinforce gender inequalities and high fertility values (Goody, 1990). Rural women are thus conferred with low status and tremendous pressure from in-laws for high fertility. Care of the string of children plus heavy farm/household workload significantly contribute to inadequate public and social visibility of rural women while undermining their health. Even the gendered perception of women as "caring" could, sometimes, endanger the life of young daughters instead of sons when made to care for HIV/AIDS relatives (United Nations, 1996b).

Headship of households

Traditional assumptions have conferred on men headship of households. Consequently, vital resources (for example, land) belong to husbands (Boserup, 1990). Similarly, recent policies of globalisation of trade, privatisation, cash-crop production, creation of export processing zones and the structural adjustment programmes have heavy gender-discriminating impacts having so far benefited men more than women leading, in many cases, to feminisation of agriculture and poverty.

Increasingly, women lose incomes from traditional crops which have been replaced by cash crops forcing them to sell their labour cheaply or work more intensively to barely meet the health and nutritional needs of their family. This has been aggravated by urban- biased/rural neglect development policies, which often, make male-dominated rural-urban migration in many developing regions( except Latin America and the Caribbean) an attractive option (Goody, 1990). In such situations, men move out to face uncertainties of job/fortune hunting while women become de jure and often de factor heads of household with or without adequate support. Remittances of between 8-24 percent of household incomes have been reported (Wang and Apthorpe, 1974) or up to 43 percent for East Asia (Greenhalgh, 1990). These could become irregular or stopped completely leaving ill- equipped women to absorb greater family responsibilities, sometimes, to the detriment of their health and household food security.

Increase in female-headed households has been widely reported (UNDP, 1995; United Nations, 1996b). About 40 percent of rural households in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and in Nicaragua are reportedly headed by women (FAO, SDWW, 1996). Even in such cases, if there is a male in the household, he is often treated as the head whether or not he contributes meaningfully to the maintenance of the unit (United Nations, 1996:107). Demographically, the poverty of many female-headed households translates into poor health, low nutritional status, greater exposure to risks of sexual abuse and violence.

Contraceptive use and unmet needs

Contraceptive use, though increasing (United Nations, 1996a), has remained lower in rural areas particularly for men. Education makes a difference in the use of contraceptives. Differences of up to 24 points have been observed for women with seven or more years of schooling and those who had none (United Nations: 1987). Both the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Operations Research Group findings in selected countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Africa, Asia and Latin America provide support to the observed positive relationship between education and contraception (Jeejebhoy, 1996:247). Education, operating through exposure to information, knowledge and appreciation of the benefits of family planning, improves spousal communication, which in turn, encourages greater acceptance and use. Rural gendered women with lower education (as in Table 1) exhibit lower rate of use and higher fertility. Beyond the issue of actual use, there remains the question as to how the women perceive the trade-off between adoption of family planning and loss of prestige that could result from smaller completed family. Improvement in the education of both men and women especially those in the rural areas is likely to bring about behavioural change required for increased appreciation and use of contraceptives.

The concept of unmet need for contraception is defined to represent "an apparent need for family planing [for women who] were not using contraceptions." (United Nations, 1996a). Usually, it is regarded as the excess of births over expressed desired number of children by women 40 years and above. The issue is whether this need can be satisfied by the provision of more contraception. For rural women with weak bargaining power vis-à-vis traditional and family pressures to produce many children, their unmet need may go beyond provision of more contraceptives. There is need to critically examine the socio-economic and cultural supports to their reproductive behaviour.

Costs of ignoring rural gender-population concerns

Improvement of human conditions has become a development priority. Past and forthcoming international conferences including the World Food Summit, stress the inevitability of human resource development for the attainment of sustainability. Rural populations, particularly women, suffer contextualised social, economic, cultural and demographic disabilities. The question is why planning and programming activities have so far achieved limited success. Part of the explanation is neglect of rural gender-population interface. The issue of gender equality is seen as "not only a matter of social justice but also of good economics." (The World Bank, 1995:3). The Bank notes that failure to invest in women is costly", and identifies three significant gains in eliminating gender inequalities: "significant productivity gains, large societal benefits [and] enhancement of poverty alleviation efforts." It estimates that doubling girl-child enrolment in secondary schools from 19 to 38 percent when other factors are held constant would lower total fertility from 5.3 to 3.9. Combining increased enrolment and family planning would result in higher reductions.

Gender-discriminatory practices persist and with greater potency in the rural areas. Both practical and strategic needs of women are subjected to stricter cultural, social and institutional regulations than men's. This keeps women marginalised. Since, a large proportion (estimated at 60 percent) of the world's poor and hungry people are women, most of them residing in rural areas, it is important to mainstream their needs in planning and programming. Otherwise, the consequences of neglect would be grave and include:

perpetuation of poverty
delay in or reversal of impending or already started demographic transition
continued denial of human/women's rights
deterioration in human conditions - growth in numbers, environmental degradation, food insecurity

It is therefore important to recognise and provide a holistic package that encompasses all the relevant factors.

Proposed inputs to planning and programming population activities

The task of providing planning and programming activities which are gender- sensitive, conducive to lowered population growth and enhancing of rural conditions is enormous. It calls for a holistic, multi-sectoral and participatory approach. The reproductive and productive roles of rural people especially women in gendered environments are critical enough to require specific focus in the UNFPA Programme Review and Strategy Development (PRSD). Many primary and secondary recommendations come to mind but only the most salient are proposed below:

Provision of rural-gender disaggregated data Currently, data are inadequate or non- existent. For effective advocacy, all activities proposed in the PRSDs should be based on sound data.
Advancement of gender-population-development analysis The movement from WPD to GPD is healthy. Both the Socio-economic and Gender Analysis approach of FAO's Women in Development Service and the Gender and Socio-economic analysis framework of UNDP are efforts to expand the coverage of analysis. Capturing the complexity of interacting variables and its impact on the entire life of rural people particularly women is strategically important. For example, in family planning, PRSDs should assess inter alia:
- how power relations in the families and households affect and are affected by family planning
- who the stakeholders or interest groups are that will win or lose if family planning is adopted
- the social costs of adopting family planning (what is the trade-off between adopting family planning and prestige loss or gain for lowered fertility) (United Nations, 1996b).
Examination of gender impacts of global trade agreements and policies, labour laws and adjustment programmes through the provision of social services - education, health including reproductive and sexual health; feminization of both agriculture and poverty.
Expansion and strengthening of local institutions and expertise to complement clinic- based reproductive health services; electronic and print media-dominated IEC activities (through use of local artists and skills).
Promotion of rural capacity building for sustainable development and elimination of poverty through improved access to education, health services, population education and gainful, paid employment. In short, it is critically important to localise interventions or relate interventions to the institutional environment.
Promotion of greater alliance between all concerned: gender, population and development experts, national governments, other United Nations Agencies, bilateral and multilateral organisations, donor communities, NGOs and other members and groups of civil society. This is absolutely essential in order to forge strong collaboration required for equitable distribution of and use of resources for global good. Poor countries, without substantial international input to salvage the poor, would find it difficult to pull through the current economic crisis.

Conclusion

This paper argued for a holistic and integrated approach to sustainable development through integrating rural concerns into overall development strategies and plans. It highlighted some gender-population issues that impinge on rural people especially women: early age at marriage, less education, higher mortality and greater burdens of family maintenance and health care, etc. It drew attention to the costs of ignoring the impacts on demographic trends of continuing gender disabilities of rural women and proposed improvements to UNFPA Programme Review and Strategy Development reports in order to achieve International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD, 1994) and the Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) goals in the nearest future.

In conclusion, attention is drawn to the words of Baroness Chalker of Wallasey which states, inter alia:

"Each nation and her people must take responsibility for their security, development and governance. But sustained development requires a broad vision: a vision which recognises the crucial importance of an educated, healthy and responsive community." An American President is quoted as having once said: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

We are witnessing the effects of rural neglect in many developing countries. The time is opportune for UNFPA in collaboration with all concerned to intensify capacity building for advocacy, IEC, reproductive health including sexual health, population education, etc. of the rural poor especially women. National governments need to examine their development policies to incorporate gender and population issues and provide basic social services for all their people. The Donor Community needs to re-assess its assistance programmes. In many situations, the recipients just need a boosting to overcome their weak financial conditions. Improvements in rural conditions, particularly for women, would yield enormous benefits to society.

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