Gender report endorses women equality for global development
Women’s equal access to land and resources can increase agricultural output to a great extent across developing nations, reveals World Bank report. However, civil society has criticised the World Bank for not changing its 33 year old discriminatory macro economic policies.
Washington: Amid policy battles over food production, energy resources and economic decline, one untapped natural resource that is guaranteed to boost production on a global scale has been stubbornly overlooked – the power of women in the labour force.
- Equal access to resources to women farmers would increase maize yields by 11 to 16% in Malawi and 17 % in Ghana/ Photo credit: Cristen
According to the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report (WDR) "Gender Equality and Development", ensuring equal access for women farmers would increase maize yields by 11 to 16% in Malawi and 17 % in Ghana; eliminating barriers that block women's access from certain occupations or sectors could reduce the gender productivity gap by one-third to one-half and boost output per worker by as much as 25 % in a range of developing countries; and granting women farmers equal to land and resources could increase agricultural output in developing countries by as much as 4 %.
As the annual fall convergence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) kicks off Tuesday in Washington DC, with participants from international financial institutions (IFIs), civil society, grassroots movements and private sector enterprises flooding the city, all eyes are on the Gender WDR, the blueprint for the course of 2012 development.
"Over the past five years, the World Bank Group has provided 65 billion dollars to support girls' education, women's health, and women's access to credit, land, agricultural services, jobs, and infrastructure," the Bank's president Robert Zoellick said Monday.
"This has been important work, but it has not been enough or central enough to what we do," he added. "Going forward, the World Bank Group will mainstream our gender work and find other ways to move the agenda forward to capture the full potential of half the world's population."
Though the report presents some positive trends, much of the data paints a bleak picture. Excess female mortality after birth and "missing" girls at birth account for an estimated 3.9 million deaths of women annually.
Two-fifths of the world's women are never born because of sex- selective abortions. A sixth of the world's women die in early childhood, and over a third perish in their early reproductive years, losses that hit particularly hard in Sub-Saharan Africa where the prevalence of HIV/AIDS is stunningly high.
While the 2012 WDR calls for more work in the areas of human capital, closing earning and productivity gaps between women and men, improving women's voices in their households and society and limiting the perpetuation of gender inequality across generations, hundreds of voices from civil society are arguing that unless the Bank undertakes major structural changes in its approach to women, very little will change.
"The real issue here is that the World Bank has never had a human rights policy, and this year's WDR follows that trend of ignoring women's rights as human rights," Elaine Zuckerman, president of the Washington-based Gender Action, told IPS.
