Asia Times: Learning to invest in women


	June 2, 2000	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Learning to invest in women
NEW DELHI - Gender was far from their minds when European Union (EU) officials launched a program to green the barren Aravalli hills that flank the Indian capital. But it did not take them long to discover that the ecological restoration scheme could not work without the help of the women of the traditionally male-dominant indigenous communities that live at the foot of the Aravallis.

Whether grazing cattle, collecting firewood for the hearth and grass for fodder, women were the major users of the commons. But reaching out to them was not easy. The local Jat and Meo women work harder than their men, but are forbidden to reveal their faces or speak to strangers. Most of them are also illiterate.

''We had to find a way to get behind their purdah (traditional veil),'' recalls EU project officer Natalia Alonso Cano. Once this was done, the women took to growing grass seeds for the first phase of the afforestation project. This sale of the seed also began earning them money. The extra cash flow into the households silenced the men, who preferred observing the women working on the project from a distance.

The Aravalli success is but one example of how South Asian women can cast off traditional social shackles that not only make them second class citizens, but even poorer and more unlettered than men in countries where most people live on less than a dollar a day. More than twice as many men can read and write than women. Although women work almost as much as men, they earn far less.

Initiatives like the EU Aravalli project are showing the way to bridge this wide gulf between the sexes in the region. Development experts say that giving poor women a source of income is one of the best ways of making them confident enough to improve their lifestyles.

This became obvious when the Aravalli women took to cultivating saplings under the EU-funded afforestation program. Today, the women are raising some 3 million saplings each year, says EU consultant Harvinder Bedi. The greening of the hills has also increased fodder available for their cattle and therefore milk to sell in the market. The project is now training the women to grow ornamental plants which are in great demand in the Indian capital.

It was the involvement of women that has made this EU's most successful project in India, says Bedi.

Similar successes centered around women have been achieved in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

One of these is the world famous micro-credit scheme of Bangladesh run by the non-governmental organization Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). BRAC's collateral-free loans totalling some $750 million have given hope to more than 3 million Bangladeshi women, enabling them to take up a variety of jobs. Today these women have accumulated savings worth $65 million.

BRAC has inspired copybook success stories in one of the world's poorest countries. Today, an estimated 8.76 million families in Bangladesh are engaged in small income- generating activities using loans similar to BRAC's. The bulk of the beneficiaries are women.

Another well-known Bangladeshi example is the women committees set up by the UN Development Program's (UNDP) South Asia Poverty Alleviation Programme (SAPAP), in Kishoreganj district. At Kishoreganj, women not only handle rice processing, a traditionally female occupation, but have also taken to poultry raising, fish farming, horticulture and cattle raising with seed money from the UNDP. Says Badiur Rehman, National SAPAP project coordinator in Bangladesh: ''Women cooperate well in getting development projects going and are safe bets when it comes to investing scarce funds.''

Women have also turned around UNDP's regional poverty alleviation project in Sri Lanka's upland regions. Although covered by tea and rubber plantations that fetch a large income to the island nation, the workers here are mostly on subsistence wages. A cow bought with a loan from a women's credit and savings scheme backed by UNDP has changed the life of Gamagader Bisomenike and her family for the better. She was even able to repair her mud house and buy some furniture by selling the milk.

Similar women's groups set up under the UNDP regional initiative have also transformed lifestyles in the mainly rural arid, low-farm yield Mahbubnagar district and its surroundings in India's southern Andhra Pradesh state. More than 4,000 self-help mainly women's groups are functioning in the state. The income from the savings and credit schemes has given a new confidence to the women of Mahbubnagar, who are no longer terrorized by local toughs.

Likewise in Nepal, where women make up two-thirds of the work force and on average earn less than half the male income, non-governmental interventions are encouraging them to break into traditional male strongholds. One of these is the lucrative tourism industry. According to Ang Diku, one of the few female trekking guides in the Himalayan nation, many more Nepali women can follow her with the growing number of all-women trekking groups demanding female guides.

Even the government has now acknowledged the changing role of women. An official document commits the government to strive for increasing Nepali women's access to non-traditional technical and managerial skills and entrepreneurial opportunities.

(Inter Press Service)

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