Women

1
Womens Status and the Changing Nature of Rural
Livelihoods in Asia

• Agnes Quisumbing
• International Food Policy Research Institute
• Manila, Philippines
• 8 August 2007

2
Diversity and change

• It is difficult to characterize womens status
  in Asia because womens conditions within Asia
  are very diverse, and they are also changing
• This presentation
• Presents a snapshot of womens status in Asia
  based on the World Gender Gap Report 2006
• Summarizes returns to closing the gender gap in
  terms of reducing child malnutrition, and
  increasing incomes and productivity
• Identifies three trends in rural livelihoods
• Based on these trends, discusses appropriate
  policies and interventions to empower women

3
Contrasts and contradictions

• Gender Gap Index 2006 (Hausman, Tyson, and Zahidi
  2007) examines the gap between men and women in
  115 countries,in four categories
• economic participation and opportunity
• educational attainment
• health and survival
• political empowerment
• Although the Philippines is among top 10
  countries, out of 8 regions, Asia ranks third
  from the bottom overall
• Lowest performance on the health and survival
  subindex
• Second to the lowest in the economic opportunity
  and participation subindex
• Third from the lowest in the educational
  attainment subindex.

4
These results driven by countries with large
populations

• China ranks 114 out of 115 because of sex ratio
  at birth, missing women
• Bangladesh, India, Pakistan large disparities
  between men and women in all four areas of the
  index
• Why should we care?
• Evidence worldwide shows that increasing
  resources controlled by women yields large
  benefits in reducing child malnutrition and
  increasing rural incomes and productivity

5
Reducing child malnutrition The Asian Enigma

• Why is South Asias child malnutrition rate so
  much higher than Sub-Saharan Africas, when it
  does so much better with respect to many of the
  long-accepted determinants of child nutritional
  status, such as national income, democracy, food
  supplies, health services, and education?
  (Ramalingaswami et al. 1996)

6
Child malnutrition and womens status across
regions
Percentage of children under 5
Indicators of womens status
Source Smith et al. 2003
7
The link between womens status and child
malnutrition

• Regression analysis shows that womens status has
  a significant, positive effect on childrens
  nutritional status in all three regions.
• Womens status improves child nutrition because
  women with greater status have better nutritional
  status, are better cared for themselves, and
  provide higher-quality care to their children.
• Womens status has the most influence where it is
  lowest. The strongest effect is found in South
  Asia followed by Sub-Saharan Africa, and it is
  weakest in Latin America and the Caribbean.

8
Increasing rural incomes and productivity

• In Bangladesh, untargeted technology
  dissemination was more likely to benefit men and
  better-off households (Hallman, Lewis, and Begum
  2007). Efforts designed to reach women within
  poor householdssuch as through NGO provision of
  training and credit for vegetable
  improvementachieved greater impacts on poverty.
• In China, where women-managed households have
  equal access to family labor, quantity and
  quality of land, irrigation, and credit, there is
  no significant difference in plot-level crop
  revenues between men and women-managed farms (de
  Brauw et al. 2007).
• In the rural Philippines, where girls have higher
  educational attainment than their brothers, they
  are more likely to enter nonagricultural
  occupations and earn higher incomes from
  nonagriculture than from farming (Quisumbing,
  Estudillo, and Otsuka 2004).

9
Three trends in rural livelihoods

• Increasing male migration from rural to urban
  areas
• Declining importance of agriculture and growth of
  nonfarm sector
• Increasing female migration to urban areas (and
  overseas)

10
Policies to empower women will differ by context

• Areas of male outmigration
• Ensure access to land and credit
• Economic development strategies that encourage
  competitive and efficient markets
• Female agricultural extension agents to deliver
  technology and information directly to women

• Areas of declining importance of agriculture
• Reduce barriers to female participation in
  nonfarm enterprises and nonfarm employment
• Invest in womens human capital through schooling
  and continuing education programs
• Access to credit, markets, and information

11
Policies and context

• Areas of female outmigration
• Invest in womens education
• Encourage competitive and efficient labor markets
• Invest in infrastructure to enable families to
  maintain social support networks (roads,
  communications, banking)

12
General policies

• Extend and strengthen schooling systems in rural
  areas
• Promote competition in non-farm labor markets so
  as to eliminate discrimination against women
• Reform property rights systems to be more
  equitable towards women
• Develop agricultural technologies which increase
  the returns to female labor, whether through
  increased demand or increased labor productivity.