by Munetsi Madakufamba
The design of economic structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and assessment of their impact often take little cognisance of gender disparities that exist across societies in southern Africa.
The World Bank/International Monetary Fund-inspired SAPs being implemented in most countries in the region, and indeed various other forms of economic transformation taking place throughout the region, are based on macroeconomics.
Women’s contribution to national economies is usually invisible as more attention is given to aggregate economic activity in the market, which is the paid economy, at the expense of the household economy, the unpaid, predominantly a female domain.
According to the Human Development Report 1996, a UN Development Programme (UNDP) publication, women constitute about half of the world’s population, averaging 50.8 percent in southern Africa, yet they do only 38 percent of remunerated work.
However, when unremunerated economic activities by women in family farms and businesses, and as mothers, wives, and daughters with obligations and responsibilities to look after others are all accounted for, the value of their work nearly doubles.
The omission of women’s unpaid work when compiling national accounts and quantifying gross domestic product is not only the result of the conceptual complexities and practical difficulties of measuring it.
“It is also the result of the implicit assumptions built into the theory of the determinants of the level and pattern of economic activity,” says Diane Elson in a document titled “Paradigm Postponed: Gender and Economic Adjustment in Sub-Saharan Africa”. Women’s unpaid work, however, cannot continue to be ignored, or assumed irrelevant, as happens under SAPs, as no economy would prosper without it.
The basics of SAPs entail that the government should, among others, lower fiscal deficits by cutting public expenditure, especially on social services; remove subsidies even on essential commodities; and deregulate both domestic and foreign trade.
Cutbacks on social expenditure adversely affect women more than men for a number of reasons.
In southern Africa, like in most parts of the developing world, women were poorer than men before SAPs and relied more heavily on public services than those living above the poverty line. More women than men live outside the cash nexus, mainly in rural areas, which excludes them from fee-for-service arrangements.
The cut on social services provided by the government is resulting in the total loss of these benefits, leading to even more feminisation of poverty. The loss of public services also results in women being forced to spend more time providing such services for their family.
“The redundant or unemployed, the children, the sick and the elderly, look up to women to alleviate or bear their burden, yet women’s work is not given economic value,” says a leaflet on Women and the
Economy in Southern Africa, prepared by SARDC.
While both men and women participate in, and are affected by economic adjustment, policy-makers seldom recognize that the costs of adjustment are distributed variably between men and women, to rich and poor, urban and rural. This is because men and women play different roles, have different needs, and face different constraints in responding to economic policy changes.
These differences have important implications for economic efficiency and foregone output and income, as well as for economic equity. Since they are gender-based differences, they provide the conceptual rationale for distinctively considering gender in development and for seeking to ensure that adjustment policies and programmes are gender-responsive.
It is upon this background that gender experts are arguing that women’s contribution to economic development should be valued and accounted for if assessment of SAPs have to portray a true picture of its effects on the economy.
A paper by C. Mark Blackden of the Human Resources and Poverty Division, Africa Technical Department, says gender bias underlying the premise of economic analysis and policy prescription leads to the “invisibility” of women’s economic contribution and to an incomplete and partial picture of total economic activity.
The gender division of labour, which critically determines women’s and men’s economic capacity, enshrines strongly asymmetrical rights and obligations of men and women. This is reflected in gender-related variations in property rights, human capital endowments, access to use of and control over factors of production, and is therefore critical in looking at the gender dimension of adjustment.
Failure to recognize the strong interdependence between the paid and unpaid economy has contributed to further marginalisation of women who are more active in the latter.
Although the impact of SAPs on women is felt in many ways, the major burden is to be found in education, health, and social life.
The health sector is probably the hardest hit. There has been a shift in primary health care from government to communities in general, and mothers in particular.
The 1996 Human Development Report shows that the infant mortality rate ranges from 67 per 1000 in
Zimbabwe to 147 in Malawi. This compares with an average of 97 for Sub-Saharan Africa.
SAPs have also contributed to women’s deteriorating capacity to look after their children. The UNDP report reveals that an average of 22 percent of children below the age of five were stunted in the period 1985to 1995 in the six southern African countries implementing SAPs.
The high cost of antenatal and post-natal care led to non-attendance or delayed attendance at clinics by pregnant and lactating mothers, a survey by the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health and Child Welfare shows. The survey also reveals that a quarter of the pregnant women in the survey attended the antenatal clinic for the first time in the third trimester, which is too late for useful risk screening, resulting in complications during birth.
This state of affairs is proof of the situation in the region where health delivery has deteriorated besides the fact that most of the countries are signatories of Global Goals for Health Improvement.
The removal of subsidies on agricultural inputs especially has pushed many women deeper into the poverty trap. The women of southern Africa are largely concentrated in rural areas where they are mainly active in subsistence agriculture. But their output has been reduced as few can now afford exorbitant inputs.
Formal sector employment opportunities are rare for women who comprise an average of 30 percent of formal sector employment in SADC, according to Women in Development Southern Africa
Awareness (WIDSAA) information briefs.
The majority of women are in the informal sector, an area that is overlooked by policy-makers despite being the backbone of industrial transformation. Unfortunately, retrenched men who have now joined the informal sector are relegating women into fruit and vegetable vending.
Some women have also taken advantage of trade liberalisation to engage in flea market selling and trading in second hand goods, a relatively new phenomenon gaining popularity mainly in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa.
During the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, James Wolfensohn, World Bank president, received a petition urging the Bank to adopt four sets of initiatives in response to the proposed Platform for Action. These were:
• promoting the participation of grassroots women’s groups in economic policy formulation:
•institutionalizing a gender perspective in the design and implementation of projects; increasing Bank lending for basic education, health and credit programmes benefiting women;
• increasing the number of women in senior management.
Women also demanded that the African debt be cancelled and the money used for development projects in order to improve the life of women in the affected countries.
Although the Bank says it has already started putting in place measures to address some of these issues, many feel a lot needs to done.
Improving the gender-sensitivity of SAPs is not only necessary for harmonizing the gender imbalance, but a means to improve economic adjustment itself. Policies that are not differentiated by gender are likely to worsen the situation of both women and men, and therefore contribute to diminished economic performance, contrary to the purpose of adjustment.
Gender analysis must therefore be an integral part of policy design and programmes aimed at promoting economic growth and alleviating poverty. This will facilitate systematic attention to be given to all gender issues, implications and design of appropriate remedial measures. (SARDC)
