EMPOWERMENT
Empowering women requires fundamental changes at many levels of society: within the household and family, between women and men, and between younger and older women; within the community and its sanctions and practices affecting health, such as son preference and female genital mutilation; within the state, whose officials and policy-makers ignore women's concerns; and within the scientific community, whose research and technology development determine the contraceptive choices for women and men. The facts below illustrate these various levels affecting women's empowerment.
WOMEN'S REALITY
Women in general, and poor women in particular, have little or no control over resources and little decision-making power. Even limited resources at their disposal -- such as a little land, a nearby forest, and their own bodies, labor and skill -- are often not within their control, and the decisions made by others affect their lives every day. This is reflected most directly in the two areas of economics and education.
Economics
- Studies in 12 different Southern countries showed that women consistently work longer hours each day than men.
- Girls begin working at an earlier age than boys and spend more hours working each day (paid and unpaid) throughout their lives, in all regions.
- In Uttar Pradesh, India, women spend as much as five hours per day searching for firewood.
- In rural southern India, women spend seven hours in market work then spend another seven hours in domestic activities, excluding child care.
- In Cala, South Africa, women have to walk six kilometers to and from the water supply and can carry only 20 liters -- not enough for the family for a day.
- A Kenyan study showed that although access to water was a high priority among rural women, it was a low priority for the village leaders, all of whom were men.
Education
- Women's adult literacy rate is less than half the male rate in many poor countries.
Literacy Rate Country Women Men Mozambique, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Senegal 20% 45-50% Sierra Leone 11% 31% China 62% 84%
- Domestic duties routinely interfere with girls' school enrollment.
- After the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone, one of the first demands by women in a badly affected area was the rebuilding of the schoolhouse and providing schoolbooks for their children. Men talked of houses, seeds, poultry, and loans.
One Woman in South Africa
Martha Ndlovu, a community health worker in South Africa, tells the story of her sister:In the early 1970s, my father forced my elder sister to get married. My sister was 14 at the time, and she disagreed with him because she felt she was too young. But my father kept insisting and threatened to throw my sister out of the house if she disobeyed him. He went to a man who paid 2OO rand as lobola [bride price] and then let this man come and collect my sister. My father just frittered that money away.
My sister was very unhappy in her marriage, but there was nothing she could do about the situation. She did not love the man, and he kept beating her because they could not live together. My sister became lean and ill. She had a heart attack and had to take constant medication. She has not been allowed to go to school, and has to look after four children. Generally, married women are not allowed to make any decisions or say anything which contradicts their husbands. They cannot take contraception of any kind because they should "give birth until the babies are finished inside the stomach." It does not matter whether you give birth 10 or 14 times.
WOMEN'S POWER
- Education enables women to respond to more opportunities, challenges traditional values, and changes life circumstances.
- Women's education is the most influential variable in the improvement of child health and prevention of infant deaths.
- Education often delays the wife's age at marriage, increases husband-wife communication and knowledge, and improves attitudes and access to birth control.
What Women Want
1. Conditions of work not only must include healthy work environments, but also protection against unemployment in cases of pregnancy and marriage, and access to appropriate services such as child care.2. Women must not only have access to income but also have control over it.
3. Employment is empowering to the extent that it provides women access to non-kin support, including women's groups, independent sources of information, and contacts with outsiders.
4. Empowerment must occur not only within women's personal lives but also in the broader spheres of the community and the state.
What Works and Why
Self-Employed Women's AssociationSEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association) in India is a trade union with 100,000 poor self-employed women as paying members. Founded in 1972, SEWA works to empower women by addressing problems and priorities identified by women themselves. One village-based program -- Shaishav (meaning "childhood" in Gujarati) -- meets the child-care needs of working women by providing comprehensive health, nutrition, and child development activities for infants and children to age three.
Everyone benefits: mothers can work and earn in the fields and tobacco factories and look for full employment, knowing their children are being properly cared for; monthly family income increases because the women no longer have to forfeit their wages; the children get improved health, nutrition, hygiene, and immunizations; and older siblings get more schooling because they are freed from taking care of younger brothers and sisters.
Women's Mobilizing: Anti-Liquor Agitation by Indian Women
An anti-liquor movement began with a few women picketing liquor shops and forcing their closure. News spread through the village grapevine and the media, and soon the whole of Nellore District, then the entire state of Andhra Pradesh was taken up in the cause. Women used a wide variety of tactics with substantial symbolic import. In one village, for example, the women cooked the daily meal, took it wrapped in leaves to the liquor shop, and demanded that the owner eat all their offerings. "You have been taking the food from our bellies all these years, so here, eat! Eat until it kills you, the way you have been killing us!" The terrified proprietor closed shop and ran, and has not reopened since.
With less arrack (crude liquor) being consumed, there is more money for food and other essentials, less physical and emotional abuse of women, and far less violence in general. For the most part, men have reacted surprisingly passively to the whole movement, perhaps because women directed their outrage and attacks at the liquor supplies, rather than at their men.
Though women in the anti-liquor movement have not directly challenged the state, they have managed to weaken it by attacking the nexus between the state and the liquor lobby. Poor women have mobilized and struck a blow for themselves and their families.
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