Thursday, October 22, 2015

Women and Poverty - Unpaid work and empowerment

Women, whether they engage in paid work or not increasingly engage in unpaid care at home for the benefit and wellbeing of all the members of the household. According to Pearson (2007), Amartya Sen indicates that women’s material and social status is derived from the part of scarce resources they contribute to the households and communities. A high proportion of their earnings go directly into meeting the basic needs of household members. Chant (2007) terms it as the intra-household resource distribution and this can lead to serious vulnerability and secondary poverty among women and children which are often experienced in male headed household since the privilege of men allow them to get higher part of the resources than even what they bring into the household.
   https://youtu.be/VVW858gQHoE. This video shows what women go through in their efforts to provide for the household coupled with limited social amenities. This woman, I will name, Wowman - goes through a whole lot in a single day to provide food and care for her family, she is denied job because of her child and does a low a paid job to get something to feed on. She indicates; people say this is not work. Until she broke down, there would have been no help from government to provide anything. Even when she had a job that paid her quite well she still thought of things needed by her family. This is the highlight of Sen, in which he indicated that the earning of women may extend their options but also intensify their workload and responsibilities without necessarily their autonomy.
Pearson indicated the problem with the idea that micro-credit and micro-enterprise has the highest tendency in empowering women. He asserted that although the micro-finance empowers women, it however reduces their autonomy. Women become responsible for debts and care for the household while their husbands control their activities.
  https://youtu.be/sg4DXX4BrYI. This link shows how microloan foundation has provided small loans to women which have empowered women to work their way out of poverty. One woman indicated that she is no longer depending on her husband for up-keep money while another indicated she is now able to buy needed items for household and take care of her children. It was also brought up that the woman is there to care and when she is financially empowered, the family will be well looked after.     
With helping women, Pearson further asserted that there should be a link between demands for international support that improve the working conditions and wages of poor women to explorations of universal entitlements in terms of minimum income and services. Women must be empowered and moved from poverty not from the sale of their labor which does not benefit them much in anyway. 
More help is needed!

3 comments:

  1. A good piece here Helena. I like your conclusion on Pearson’s article. Reflecting on your blog, one thing that I would like to comment on in this week’s readings is the question of the relationship that exists between globalization and its impact on the informal sector. Relative to this is the manner in which Pearson delves in exploring the assumptions that have greatly ingrained the perceptions that a globalized society is one through which poor women are frugally endowed. Evaluating some of the views presented in this week’s articles, one is bound to understand the experiences that have weakened micro-credit approach as a tool to empowering women. Lack of good policies and legal frameworks have failed to protect vulnerable women in so many ways. While so many of the things discussed remains to be true, there are few things that are worthy noting here. Firstly, the assumptions that independent sources of income outside homes in form of microcredits contribute to reducing economic dependency among women; Secondly, new sources of ideas, values and social support make women assertive of their rights; and lastly, that microeconomics gives women autonomy and thus, raises women’s prestige in the eyes of their husbands is contracting and needs to be examined carefully.

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  2. Helena I felt you have intrigued the subject of women and empowerment from a multi perspective approach, which I believe is great. Nonetheless, the subject of women poverty assessment and alleviation is a high agenda among Feminist and development practices. This is because some data suggest that women command a higher proportion of poverty than male counterparts, precisely 60-70% of the world's poor. This situation is compounded due to women's marginalization in mainstream development and their male counterparts.
    I think sometimes the generalization of poverty patterns across the globe without establishing root causes makes intervention programs ineffective.
    All that being said, this leads to the question why intervention programs tend not to yield desirable outcome. One the strategies highly applied as a empowerment to women is micro credit. Micro credit in itself is a complex financial instruction to adequately address poverty. This is because micro credit has multi purpose, some to developed handicraft and small-scale business. Some of them are established just to provide safety to communities during food crisis. Therefore, for micros credit to effectively empower women, its conception should embrace women needs to address their plight through credit schemes.
    I suggest seeking women views or voices in any intervention program are crucial to its success, because women will take ownership of what the intervention wish to accomplish.

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  3. I do agree that women should be empowered not only economically, but socially and politically as well. Sen mentioned that women’s workload may increase as they may be co-providers or lone providers for their households, but they still may not make the financial decisions. It is suggested that economic initiatives (typically microcredit programs) be complemented by social initiatives. These social programs would be aimed at increasing awareness of social/political rights of women and individuals of other genders, encouraging mobilization of women in the political arena, building self-esteem of girls and women, and working on local level to address class and race issues. It would be a mistake to only see poverty eradication through economic terms. If women’s ‘empowerment’ is the goal of development projects worldwide, practitioners must not try to use global solutions to address these issues. Local context should be understood and local knowledge should be counted. Interventions must be crafted in collaboration with the initiative’s intended clients. ‘Development’ programs may have to adopted more base level approaches to achieve their goals. Microfinance can be utilized here, but is not THE solution to creating more tolerant communities or vastly changing family dynamics. It should be paired with a variety of interventions that work together in a more holistic approach.

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