Women and Development Essays

Women and Development Essays Women and Development Essay Women and Development Essay Enhancing women’s participation in economic development is essential not only for achieving social justice but also for reducing poverty. World wide experience shows clearly that supporting a stronger role for women contributes to economic growth, it improves child survival and overall family health and it reduces fertility thus helping to slow population growth rates. In short investing in women is central to sustainable development. And yet, despite these known returns, women still face many barriers in contributing to and benefiting from development.It is from this backdrop that this essay seeks to describe the ways and means to promote women’s participation in economic development. The essay will begin by defining the concept of economic development, after that it will go into describing the ways and means to promote women’s participation in economic development, in this essay the ways and means will be broken down into five areas, edu cation, health, wage labour, agriculture and natural resource management and financial services. Thereafter a conclusion will be drawn.The concept of economic development can be taken to mean the sustained, concerted actions of policy makers and communities that promote the standard of living and economic health of a specific area. Economic development can also be referred to as the quantitative and qualitative changes in the economy. Such actions can include multiple areas including development of human capital, critical infrastructure, regional competitiveness, environmental sustainability, social inclusion, health, safety, literacy and other initiatives (Todaro amp; Smith, 2005).Education is the most important means of empowering women with the knowledge, skills and self confidence necessary to participate fully in the development process. Education is important for everyone but it is especially significant for girls and women. This is true not only because education is an entry point to other opportunities, but also because the educational achievements of women can have ripple effects within the family and across generations. Investing in girls’ education is one of the most effective ways to reduce poverty.Investments in secondary school education for girls especially yield high dividends. Girls who have been educated are likely to marry later and to have smaller and healthier families. Educated women can recognize the importance of health care and know how to seek it for themselves and their children. Education helps girls and women to know their human rights and to gain confidence to claim them (Thompson, 2004). In addition to this, the education of parents is linked to their children’s educational attainment, and the mother’s education is usually more influential than the father’s.An educated mother’s greater influence in household negotiations may allow her to secure more resources for her children. Educated mothers a re more likely to be in the labour force, allowing them to pay some of the costs of schooling, and may be more aware of returns to schooling. And educated mothers, averaging fewer children, can concentrate more attention on each child. Besides having fewer children, mothers with schooling are less likely to have mistimed or unintended births.This has implications for schooling, because poor parents must choose which of their children to educate (ibid). Closing the gender gap in education is a development priority. The 1994 Cairo Consensus recognised education especially for women, as a force for social and economic development. Universal completion of primary education was set as a 20- year goal, as was wider access to secondary and higher education among girls and women. Closing the gender gap in education by 2015 is also one of the benchmarks for the Millennium Development Goals.Therefore it must be stated that once women are educated, they are able to participate effectively in e conomic development (Vossenberg, 2013). Secondly there is the area of health, avoidable female deaths in the developing countries are strongly associated with health care and nutrition failures, whereas avoidable male mortality is associated more with behavioural occupational hazards that are less susceptible to prevention within the health sector, such as exposure to toxins, smoking, drug and alcohol use, violence and accidents.The low marginal costs of preventing women’s disability, illness, and premature death through family planning, nutritional supplementation, community based primary health care and safe mother hood programs (including safe abortion) argue for expanding such programmes in all countries especially in high mortality, high fertility settings. Health services that integrate nutrition training and supplementation, family planning, maternal and childcare and primary health care are the most effective in reaching women because they address a wide spectrum of w omen’s needs and responsibilities and save them time.In some settings the training of female health personnel may be particularly important, and combining care for women and children can help overcome some of the permission barriers that inhibit women from seeking health care. Ensuring that women have access to quality health care would enable them to effectively participate in economic development (World Bank, 1994). Thirdly there is the area of wage labour, unlike the strategies in education and health, those for increasing the participation rates of women and reducing wage differences between men and women are less proven.The main strategies here include increasing the productivity of women, reducing the constraints women face while participating in the labour market and improving the efficiency of the labour market. Providing childcare can reduce the household constraints that working women face, particularly in urban areas where the extended family often is not available to help. With broader childcare facilities available, women may not need to compromise on the type of jobs they accept. This would begin to bridge the male-female differences in earnings that cannot be attributed to human capital differences.For example the community childcare project in Colombia provides for the nutrition, health, and early-childhood development needs of children aged 2 through 6 in low income urban communities. Community mothers chosen by parents, care for about fifteen children each in their homes. The service support component of the project provides training to the community mothers and helps upgrade their homes to reach minimum standards for providing childcare. It increases the productive potential of mothers by offering alternative childcare arrangements, but its cost-effectiveness has yet to be evaluated (ibid).Removing policies of segregation and discrimination to promote access to jobs and making information available to lower the search costs associated with finding a job are other strategies. For instance the employment and training project in Turkey incorporates some of these actions, but it is too recent to provide insights about their effectiveness. In the ongoing projects in Turkey and Hungary, youth and adult counselling systems and career awareness are intended to be gender neutral.This is to ensure gender neutrality in job vacancies, the abolition of gender preferences can be specified as a project goal, as in the Turkey employment project. In countries where there is gender segregation, training projects for women could be designed to be more gender sensitive and address segregation issues. And where equal employment laws exist, countries can be encouraged to enforce them more rigorously. This would in turn ensure that more and more women are able to participate in economic development (Rakodi, 2005). The fourth area has to do with agriculture and natural resource management.The many responsibilities of rural women can im pose time and energy constraints on their participation in programs designed to increase their incomes. Part of the strategy, therefore is to increase their productivity in existing tasks. However, given the option, many women want to escape the drudgery of many of these activities, highlighting the importance of increasing women’s options in agriculture and in home production. Many projects of the World Bank and other agencies include three basic interventions to improve the delivery of extension services to rural women.One is to improve the delivery of appropriate extension messages to women as a separate clientele. The second is to increase the number of female agents and supervisors in the extension system or to separate facilities, transportation, and other resources for extension women farmers. Delivering appropriate extension messages to women may entail revising the content and orientation of extension in order to address women farmers’ needs (Farnworth amp; Mu nachoga, 2010). Furthermore, women bear the burden of environmental degradation, as they have to trek long distances to fetch fuel wood and water.Natural resource management projects and policy oriented studies need to fully evaluate the costs and adverse externalities of environmental damage by including the direct and indirect costs to women’s activities. Deforestation, for example impose both direct and opportunity costs on women. Direct costs result when fuel wood resources are depleted (and must be purchased) and indirect costs occur when women have to walk long distances to obtain fuel wood. When they can be trained to contribute to environmental conservation.Such training in research and analysis of environmental problems and their causes and consequences can equip women to participate effectively in decision making on issues relating to environmental policy. Technology transfer if appropriately designed and adapted, could lead to more efficient use of resources, yield significant environmental benefits and enhance women’s productivity to use resources more sustainably (Rakodi, 2005). Natural resources management projects need to identify and consult women’s groups in order to ensure environmental conservation and sustainable management.Failure to identify and acknowledge the role of women in environmental processes can result in inappropriate interventions and jeopardize the success of environmental projects. Wherever women play a role in influencing policymaking on environment, investigators could document and learn from experience. Women’s groups and environmental NGOs can also play an important role (ibid). Lastly there is the area of financial services, high transaction costs, and high perceived risks of default, lack of collateral and social resistance commonly bar women’s access to credit.One way to reduce transaction costs is group lending, in which members accept joint liability for loans this relieves the len der of the costly process of checking the creditworthiness of individual borrowers and lowers the administrative costs per loan, which is particularly important if the average loan is very small. The groups take over many of the screening, incentive and enforcement functions normally left to banking staff. Group lending also spares borrowers elaborate application procedures, transportation costs, and the need for collateral.Other techniques for lowering transactions include inexpensive and mobile offices, hiring of staff from client communities, and standardized and decentralized procedures for lending. Group lending also lowers the risk of default. The combination of peer pressure and cooperative gained from participation in a group has proved to be an effective motivator for repayment in many different countries and settings worldwide (Vossenberg, 2013). Lack of collateral is a pervasive problem for the poor, and particularly for women who rarely have title to significant assets.J oint liability groups replace collateral with a collective guarantee in many programs. Providing access to financial services is necessary but not sufficient. Women who have never used a bank must be taught how to do so. Training and confidence building are especially important for women, who are likely to have less formal education and less experience with formal organizations and procedures. Alongside financial services, it is imperative to equip women with training in small enterprise, entrepreneurship and management, how to begin and successfully sustain an enterprise.When women have access to financial services, they will be better equipped to participate effectively in economic development (World Bank, 1994). In conclusion, this essay has discussed various ways and means of enhancing women’s participation in economic development. The first one being education, which has been identified as being the most important, this is because education gives women power, self confid ence and the knowledge that can equip them to participate fully in economic development. The second one is health, access to good quality health enables women to effectively participate in economic growth.The third, point has to do with wage labour, there is need for more and more women to be incorporated into wage labour, this would ensure that women start getting a stable salary which would help them to have disposable income that they can invest in businesses, and eventually they would be able to participate in economic development. The last two points that have been discussed are agriculture and natural resource management and financial resources. When women are properly trained in the area of agriculture and finances, they are better able to participate in economic development.