Tag: Women & Economy

Commonwealth Civil Society Offers Ministers Crucial Recommendations for Gender Equality Advancement — Global Issues

Keithlin Caroo speaks to young Saint Lucian on International Rural Women’s Day. Education is an important part of advocacy on behalf of women and girls. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS
  • by Alison Kentish (saint lucia)
  • Inter Press Service

SAINT LUCIA, Nov 03 (IPS) – Amid fears that global shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic have eroded progress toward gender equality, the Commonwealth Foundation has created an online platform that takes civil society’s recommendations for the empowerment of women and girls directly to policymakers.On August 22, 2023, Women’s Affairs Ministers from the Commonwealth huddled in a room at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, they were meeting in person.

The 13th Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting was being held under the theme, Equality Towards a Common Future. It was taking place amid the acknowledgement by policymakers that issues like accelerating climate change, economic turmoil, political upheaval in some parts of the world, and the COVID-19 pandemic have taken a debilitating toll on progress toward the empowerment of women and girls.

Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis vowed that the gathering would be solutions-oriented.

“The time is now for our Commonwealth community to be unabashedly ambitious in our goals and plans. We need more than slogans – we need commitments,” he said.

As Dr Anne Gallagher, Director General of the Commonwealth Foundation, addressed the high-level forum, images of a recent online civil society gathering organized by the Foundation flashed on screens across the room. The key outcome of that event was a list of ten recommendations that civil society groups from across the Commonwealth want women’s affairs ministers to consider.

Recommendation number seven, “Measure better to target better,” appeared on the screen. It was one of the recommendations that drew animated discussion among delegates. It came from a young woman dedicated to helping women farmers in her part of the world.

The journey of a recommendation from an online forum to the Commonwealth’s highest decision-making body for women’s affairs is serving as an example of the importance of not just giving a voice to those who are on the ground, working with women and girls but ensuring that their concerns are heard by those charged with gender equality policy action.

A Virtual Roundtable

Keithlin Caroo was a panellist on the Commonwealth Foundation’s Critical Conversations series, a virtual discussion that seeks to find sustainable solutions to the most pressing issues for the 2.5 billion citizens of the Commonwealth.

For years, Caroo has been on a mission to help rural women in her home country, Saint Lucia, and has extended that support to the neighboring islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and St. Kitts and Nevis. She is the founder and executive director of Helen’s Daughters, a non-profit organization that she refers to as a ‘community,’ which has been changing the narrative on women in agriculture. Helen’s Daughters is built on the premise that while in small states, everyone is connected to agriculture, women are not sufficiently supported despite their pivotal role in the sector.

The organization helps rural women with market access and forges linkages for farmers with supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, and the public through a FarmHers Market. It runs a free Rural Women’s ‘Ag-cademy’ on the islands of Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which focuses on sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship. It is the first all-women agri-apprenticeship programme in the Caribbean. The organization operates a structured care system that focuses on the holistic development of women, hosting training on trauma-informed care to peer-to-peer support and wellness retreats.

Before the virtual event, the Commonwealth Foundation had made it clear – recommendations from the forum would be put before decision-makers. When Caroo spoke, she did so on behalf of the women farmers who toil daily in a sector fraught with gender biases.

“This engagement was important because it shows that the voices of grassroots organizations are important to Commonwealth’s policymaking; however, what’s important for me is seeing to it that the recommendations translate from policy to actions on the ground,” she said in an interview with IPS.

“We recognized the lack of sex-disaggregated early on, and aside from our interventions, data collection, monitoring, and evaluation are key to our work. Lack of data places further burden on us because aside from crafting interventions relevant to our beneficiaries, we are also responsible for primary data collection, which takes more time and resources; however, we must craft interventions according to the current state of play rather than what is imagined. As I said during the roundtable- “We can only target better if we measure better.”

Voices like Caroo’s played an important role in ensuring a commonwealth-wide response to gender inequality.

The Process

With its theme Gender, climate change and health: how can we do better for women and girls? the virtual roundtable stoked discussion on cross-cutting issues such as violence against women, investing in women and access to education.

“The event was deliberately outcome-oriented: it included not just a debate and discussion but also a highly focused working session where all participants were charged with coming up with specific recommendations to present to this body. Not a shopping list of blue-sky ideas but practical steps that they felt reflect what Commonwealth civil society – what the 2.5 billion citizens of the Commonwealth, want their countries to do for women and girls when it comes to health and climate change,” said Gallagher.

She reminded the gathering that the Foundation is a link between Commonwealth Member States and the people they all serve. She urged the ministers to reflect on the ‘clear and urgent’ recommendations from civil society.

“For me, the clarity and simplicity of the ten recommendations signals an important truth: we all understand the challenges we are up against in relation to women’s rights and well-being, and also in relation to climate change. We all appreciate what must be done. But shifting the current trajectory in ways that make a real difference will require much more. It will require courage, commitment, and true solidarity within and between countries of the Commonwealth,” she said.

The Recommendations

Recommendation seven, “Measure better to target better,” might have struck a chord with attendees, but the other nine recommendations were also well received.

They are:

  • Acknowledge that the impacts of the climate crisis are not gender-neutral,
  • Empower women through gender-responsive climate policies and actions,
  • Improve access to education and training for women and girls,
  • Improve climate finance and bring women forward as leaders and decision-makers,
  • Value and promote women and girls as adaptation educators and agents of change,
  • Promote gender equality in access to healthcare
  • Act to reduce gender-based violence
  • Enhance women’s economic empowerment.

The meeting’s official outcome statement notes that the recommendations were welcomed and endorsed.

Their journey is not over – they are now part of the women’s affairs ministerial meeting recommendations that will be brought before Commonwealth Heads of Government at their 2024 meeting in Samoa.

“I thought this engagement was of particular importance because I had never been to a panel at this level that spoke on the intersection of gender, climate change and health or intersectionality in general. Far too often, we focus on these themes in silos,” Caroo said.

“We do not consider Helen’s Daughters an agricultural organization because we deal with gender, climate change, gender-based violence, health, economic empowerment, climate and environmental justice, several areas that contribute to the overall development of our FarmHers. I thought the roundtable was timely because our policymaking needs to take an intersectional approach.”

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Women Correct Historical Injustices, Build Climate Resilience Through Cash Pooling — Global Issues

Without land rights, women cannot make the necessary decisions to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
  • by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
  • Inter Press Service

NAIROBI, Oct 31 (IPS) – Excluded by inheritance and ignored by big business, women farmers in Kenya are turning to innovative methods to become independent food producers and get the financial backing to ensure their success.
Creating resilience is crucial to adapting to climate change and ensuring climate justice.
 Although women account for more than three-quarters of the agricultural labour force and manage 40 percent of small-scale farms, historically, they neither owned nor controlled the land because land rights were passed down to male relatives. It is a historic gender injustice whereby women could only access land through close male relatives.

But as the vagaries of drought wreak havoc in the agricultural sector due to more failed rainfall seasons – with 2022 alone showing signs of a serious hydrological and ecological drought – gender and climate experts, such as Grace Gakii, tell IPS that women’s decision-making powers are much needed to ensure that extreme weather patterns do not paralyse the agricultural sector.

“The agriculture sector is the backbone of Kenya’s economy. It accounts for an estimated 33 percent of the country’s GDP and employs at least 40 percent of its population and 70 percent of the rural population. Without land rights, women cannot make the necessary decisions to either adapt or mitigate climate change,” she says.

“In mitigation, they cannot, for instance, decide if and when trees are planted. In adaptation, they have no say in, for instance, shifting to more climate-resilient crops. We have no shortage of indigenous seeds to help us navigate the rainfall deficit we are increasingly experiencing. But women have historically been denied the power to make these decisions even though it is women who provide the day-to-day farm labour.”

The revolutionary SACCO scheme is increasingly putting land rights in the hands of women and enabling them to access much-needed tools to build climate-resilient farming systems. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
The agriculture sector is the backbone of Kenya’s economy. It accounts for an estimated 33 percent of the country’s GDP. Women play a critical role in the sector. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
The agriculture sector employs at least 40 percent of the country’s population and 70 percent of the rural population. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Serah Nyokabi says the revolutionary Savings and Credit Cooperative Society (SACCO) is increasingly putting land rights in the hands of women and facilitating access to the tools needed to build climate-resilient farming and food systems.

“I am a member of Afya SACCO. We save and take loans at a low interest. I use the loans to hire land in Central Kenya for farming and buy items such as seeds, fertilizer and even water. We rely on rainfall, and these days you cannot tell when it will rain, and even when it rains, it is often not enough. I also hire people to help me around the farm because I am a full-time teacher. SACCOs also buy large pieces of land, subdivide, and sell to members. I bought a piece of land this way, and they allow you to pay in small amounts over a six-month period,” she tells IPS.

SACCOs are a cash pooling scheme by a group of people to save and borrow low-interest loans amongst themselves. Kenya’s SACCO sector is popular and on an upward trajectory. Recent reports show that accumulated total deposits of savings grew from USD 3.8 billion in 2021 to USD 4.2 billion in 2022 (Ksh 564.89 billion to Ksh 629.45 billion)– representing a 9.84 percent increase. In 2021, the total membership of regulated SACCOs was 5.99 million members compared to 6.42 million members in 2022, and this represented an increase of 7.02 percent.

Gakii says that regulated SACCOs represent about half of all SACCOs in Kenya, as many others are unregulated. She says there are at least 22,000 SACCOs and more than 14 million members overall in this East African nation, transacting billions every year amongst themselves. Some SACCOs, such as Afya SACCO, have thousands of members and others less than 100 members.

Others, such as the well-known Muungano (cooperative) Women’s Group, own prime land and a fully occupied commercial high-rise building in Ongata Rongai on the outskirts of Nairobi, have an all-female membership, and many others, such as Afya SACCO have both men and women as members. Muungano Women’s Group raises about USD 40,000 in rent per month from the Ongata Rongai commercial building, which is fully occupied, and members have also purchased prime land of their own.

“SACCOs are very important to women. They were shunned by banks because the profile of a Kenyan woman was too risky. The percentage of women in gainful employment was very low because many worked for their husbands or fathers in the informal settlements. Due to our customary laws that favour men over women, women did not own property or any assets and therefore lacked the collateral needed to take out bank loans. In fact, women could only open a bank account accompanied by a male relative, preferably her husband. SACCOs have helped women navigate these challenges as all they need is to save with a SACCO, produce three guarantors within the SACCO to take a loan or simply borrow against their own savings,” Gakii explains.

Although the percentage of women holding land title deeds is still very small, as only one percent of all land title deeds are in the hands of women alone and five percent held jointly with men, Gakii stresses that this is progress and is to be celebrated.

“We have another large category of women that hire land for commercial farming. This would not have been possible without the loans from schemes such as SACCOs,” she says.

Gakii says women need access and control over land to play a much-needed role in the five pillars of climate resilience, including threshold capacity, coping capacity, recovery capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity.

“I taught agriculture in secondary schools for many years, and during that time, I had access to the small farm at the school for practical sessions, but back home, I could only execute the instructions from my husband. He was an accountant, and I was essentially the farmer, but he made all the decisions. Women interact with the soil on a day-to-day basis, but they cannot make decisions about how to best address the climate crisis. The result is a serious food crisis. We have large tracks of fertile lands, but here we are with a begging bowl,” Nyokabi observes.

“We started by experiencing floods and droughts in close succession. In 2018, we had two extremes in one season, whereby March, April and May were very rainy, followed by a very dry season in October, November, and December. Last month we were repeatedly warned to prepare for El Niño in the October-November-December season, but now we have been told that there will be no El Niño. In fact, there is no rain at all, and yet we are in the short rain season where we plant in October and harvest in December-January. The person who is more likely to note these changes and see a pattern is the one who is doing the day-to-day farming activities, and so the role of women in building resilient farming systems cannot be ignored.”

With an estimated 98 percent of agriculture in Kenya being rainfed and as climate change becomes a most pressing issue as a result of cumulative rainfall deficits over many years, the role of women in building climate resilience cannot be overemphasized, as is the need for interventions that can facilitate women’s access to land rights and much-needed farm inputs.

Kenya: Agriculture by Numbers
Women in Agriculture

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Seniors Thriving Through Plastic Waste in Zimbabwe — Global Issues

Tabeth Gowere (76) makes extra cash from weaving plastic waste. A group of seniors started weaving plastic out of a need to improve the environment and make some extra cash. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS
  • by Jeffrey Moyo (harare)
  • Inter Press Service

HARARE, Oct 20 (IPS) – They do not have a pension nor financial support from families or relatives, but they have themselves. Now they have become collectors of plastic waste, which they turn into products as they battle for survival – earning money from the growing plastic pollution in Zimbabwe.

Such are the lives of the country’s senior citizens, like 76-year-old Tabeth Gowere and 81-year-old Elizabeth Makufa, both hailing from Harare’s Glenora high-density suburb, where they become famous as plastic waste collectors.

Gowere and Makufa, thanks to plastic waste, now care for themselves financially despite their old age, so they said.

“At first, we saw plastic waste just being flown around by the wind, and we started to pick these, cleaning the environment, burning it, but later realized we could make something out of these plastics and earn money.  So, using plastic waste, we started weaving different things, including mats to decorate sofas. Many people were impressed by our work, and they started placing orders for the plastic products we were making,” Gowere told IPS.

Makufa, like Gowere, has also seen gold in the dumped plastic waste.

“We say this is waste, but from it, we find something that is helping us to sustain us in life. I make 30 US dollars daily at times from selling the products I make from plastic waste, which means at least I get something to survive,” Makufa told IPS.

The young are learning from the lessons from the senior plastic waste entrepreneurs – like 40-year-old Michelle Gowere.

“Weaving things using plastics is a skill I learned from my mother-in-law, Mrs Gowere. We spend time together daily, and because of this, I ended up learning the skill from her; this is helping me to, at least, help my children with food to carry in their lunch boxes when they go to school,” Michelle told IPS.

To Michelle’s mother-in-law and many others, the environment has been the secondary beneficiary of the geriatrics’ initiative collecting plastic waste.

“You would see that in our area, waste collectors from the council rarely come to empty the refuse bins. So, as we use plastic waste to make our products, we are making our environment clean,” Michelle told IPS.

Zimbabwe Environmental Management Agency (EMA) about 1.65 million tonnes of waste are produced annually in Zimbabwe, with plastic making up 18 percent of that.

However, Makufa says it was not the love of money that swayed them into getting into plastic waste but improving the environment.

“It was not because we lacked money that we turned to collecting plastic waste, but we copied some people who were doing it, and we started doing the same. We thought of removing plastic waste from our environment, and we told ourselves if we could take those plastics and weave them together, we could have impressive products that we could sell and earn some money,” Makufa told IPS.

As the group of elderly people are making a difference in collectively fighting plastic waste, the local authorities welcome their contribution but add that it is everybody’s responsibility to care for the environment.

“The job of caring for the environment is not a responsibility of the council alone. In fact, it is the duty of everyone to make sure where they live there is cleanliness. As a council, we thank people who are beginning to realize that there is money in plastic waste. It’s not every waste that should be dumped; there is what we call recycling, and some people make money from it, but the duty to take care of our surroundings is not a prerogative of the council, but ordinary people as well,” Innocent Ruwende, Harare City Council spokesperson, told IPS.

Priscilla Gavi, director of Help Age Zimbabwe, a non-governmental organization mandated to take care of the elderly’s needs, says the elderly, too, are critical in the fight against plastic waste.

“Old age does not make someone incapable of supporting their families and taking care of themselves. It doesn’t stop the aged from working for their country. In fact, old age gives people opportunities to use skills gained during their prime ages, and they, for instance, make use of plastics, producing different things for sale from plastic waste as they also rid the environment of the plastic waste,” Gavi told IPS.

Yet for many like Makufa, collecting plastic waste has also turned out to be therapeutic in addition to being an economic venture.

“These things that we make with our own hands using plastic waste help us to rest from mental stress owing to problems we have these days that strain us psychologically. So, this helps us to be always occupied and refrain from overthinking about things we don’t have control over,” said Makufa.

According to the Environmental Management Agency (EMA), an estimated 1.65 million tonnes of waste are produced annually in Zimbabwe, with plastic making up to 18 percent of that.

Gowere and Makufa and other elderly recyclers and plastic entrepreneurs have drawn the admiration of organizations like EMA.

“This is a commendable initiative that is promoting upcycling of waste and upscaling recycling as a business. This reduces the amount of waste that ends up in landfills and the environment. Plastic waste takes hundreds of years to decompose, and it releases harmful toxins into the environment when burned,” Amkela Sidange, spokesperson for EMA, told IPS.

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Women hold the Key to Success of Pastoralism in Africa — Global Issues

Cattle quench their thirst at a drying river as worsening drought conditions continue in Isiolo County, Kenya. Credit: ILRI/Geoffrey Njenga
  • by Maina Waruru (nairobi)
  • Inter Press Service

NAIROBI, Oct 17 (IPS) – Women in pastoralist areas of East Africa are critical to the health of livestock in their communities, holding the key to effective animal vaccination campaigns meant to protect herds against deadly diseases.

They are, therefore, an important part of any vaccination strategies designed to guard the animals against killer outbreaks and need to be involved in such efforts for them to be successful. 

Achieving the goals of such campaigns has become increasingly important as the effects of climate change introduce new diseases that threaten the sector and, by extension, household incomes.

It has become critically important to integrate females in such health campaigns, and one barrier to their success is the failure of authorities and development agencies to involve them.

While women, due to cultural reasons, do not commonly own livestock, they act as caregivers when the animals are sick, and with incidents of disease outbreaks rising, involving them, in the end, ensures improved food and financial security for families.

Besides, an increasing number of households in the region where livestock keeping is the economic mainstay are being headed by women who also act as providers to their families.

Unsurprisingly, as many as 43 percent of livestock insurance policyholders in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, where the policies have been introduced in the recent past, are women, scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) say.

“Besides taking care of animals when they are sick, women influence the allocation of resources at the household level, determining things such as how money should go to buying vaccines, for example. Therefore, a strong gender strategy to allow women access to disease control is very important,” said Dr Bernard Bett, ILRI Senior Scientist, Animal and Human Health Program.

In its disease surveillance and response strategy, ILRI engaged “community disease reporters,” local leaders, and village women’s champions, including women heads of households, to gather information on outbreaks and to create awareness about vaccination campaigns, says Bett.

At times he noted, women got intimidated in queues by men during mass vaccination exercises, making them lose valuable time for other chores at home as they waited for their turn in the queue.

Authorities and organizations carrying out the missions have responded by enforcing a first–come–first–serve policy in the interest of fairness and increased animal health personnel staffing levels for orderly vaccinations, he explained.

Recognizing that conflict with household tasks was a permanent reality for women, ILRI practiced and advocated for early communication to enable better planning through community messaging while actively supporting females’ role in caring for livestock, he added.

Climate change, evidenced by frequent droughts and flood incidents in arid and semi-arid areas of East Africa that are the home of pastoralism in the region, Bett observed, presented a major disease burden with incidents of outbreaks of diseases such as Rift Valley Fever being a major threat.

“Highly climate-sensitive diseases causing pathogens attracted by changes in weather conditions, including those caused by vectors such as ticks and tsetse flies, become common. Efficient delivery of disease control measures, including vaccinations, is therefore important,” he told a recent media briefing in Nairobi.

Owing to the nomadic nature of pastoralists in search of pastures and water in times of shortage it is women are the ones who take care of households when the men are away with cattle and camels, while women are left behind caring for goats, calves, and vulnerable animals, making them also effectively in charge of their households.

Like their counterparts in the crop farming areas of the region, women pastoralists are faced with the challenge of providing food for their families, which is made worse by lack of income due to livestock deaths, noted Dr Rupsha Bernerjee, ILRI senior scientist attached to livestock and climate initiative.

“Whenever there are shocks such as droughts which in turn lead to food shortages, women skip meals to ensure their families are fed. It is therefore important to promote social inclusion in livestock health programs to ensure no one is left behind,” she said.

The impressive uptake of livestock insurance among women increases the resilience of herder communities, enabling them to cope with climate-induced risks, she added.

“Payments made to herders when droughts are very severe help in reducing distress sales of livestock guaranteeing that families are cushioned against possible malnutrition, thus the importance of women livestock health,” she told the briefing at the global body’s Nairobi headquarters.

In appreciating the important role in the health of livestock IDRC, Global Affairs Canada and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation established the Livestock Vaccine Innovation Fund (LVIF), which supports the development and production of innovative vaccines to improve livestock health and the livelihoods of farmers.

The agency notes that worldwide, more than 750 million people keep livestock as a source of income, 400 million being women, but animal diseases, such as Newcastle disease in chickens and peste des petits ruminants (PPR) in goats, create widespread devastation, with women disproportionately affected because “they are less likely than men to be able to access vaccines to prevent such losses.”

“Millions of women livestock holders face financial and animal losses when diseases sweep through their farms. These infections are often highly preventable with a simple vaccination, so what is preventing women from taking measures to protect their assets?” the IDRC poses.

To answer find answers to the imbalance, the partners launched a regional livestock vaccine initiative called SheVax+ research project was launched in 2019, bringing together Cumming School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University-US, the Africa One Health University Network (AFROHUN) together and implementing partners, Makerere University, University of Nairobi, and University of Rwanda.

Helen Amuguni, the SheVax+ principal investigator, identifies three primary barriers to livestock vaccine uptake among women smallholder livestock farmers in East Africa, including gender norms, which lead to women having less access to information on vaccinations, animal health, and livestock management practices.

Stereotypes, she says, affect the way women are viewed in relation to livestock ownership, leading to their exclusion during vaccination information campaigns. Power relations also mean some women require permission from the male household head to attend training or control livestock-related resources.

As a result, many women lack understanding of, among other things, the availability and importance of vaccines, while those who do have awareness may be prevented from acting upon it, she explains.

Besides carrying out disease control and management initiatives insuring livestock, as happens with the Index-Based Livestock Insurance pioneered by ILRI to ‘de-risk’ the sector, was a critical component of cushioning the sector’s well-being and incomes for households, according to Bernard Kimoro, head of climate change and livestock sustainability in the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, Kenya.

Operational in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, the insurance utilizes satellite data to determine and read the conditions of the vegetation, where herders get compensation when the vegetation turns brown/yellow to indicate drought or shortage of foliage.

Desperation in the pure livestock systems in the region due to frequent climate change-linked droughts in the region called for both new animal disease control and feeds and nutritional strategies, he said.

The droughts have led to keepers using unsustainable feeds with high methane gas levels owing as the owners tried to keep animals alive during the dry spells, the official regrets.

The Greater Horn of Africa region is predicted to experience El Nino weather conditions characterized by higher than usual rainfall beginning this October to early 2024.

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Nigerian Women Challenge ‘Colonialist’ Patriarchy — Global Issues

Bukes Saliu, a forklift driver, is a Nigerian woman who challenging stereotypes. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS
  • by Promise Eze (lagos)
  • Inter Press Service

LAGOS, Sep 28 (IPS) – Bukes Saliu wakes up very early every workday to beat the gruesome Lagos traffic to head to a job quite unusual for a woman to engage in Nigeria. She is a forklift operator in one of the busy depots in the coastal city, a task traditionally meant for men in the West African country.

In a country where women are seen as second-class citizens and whose roles are expected to be confined to the kitchen, Saliu is not letting patriarchal norms put her in a box.

“People are always thrilled when I tell them what I do. Sometimes I get snide remarks from some men I work with, but I don’t allow that to get to me,” Saliu says.

In August 2022, her curiosity was piqued when she came across a post on WhatsApp from her friend featuring a woman confidently posed beside a forklift machine. That ignited her interest in the job. Soon after, she enrolled in training to become a skilled forklift operator.

“It was a change of career path for me. I used to be a project manager with a non-profit, but I left the job to be a forklift operator. The first day I started work, I was a bit afraid, but now I operate the machine like any other man would do. I believe that women should be allowed at the table because it brings different perspectives, ideas, and experiences,” she adds.

Patriarchy Lives in Nigeria

Discrimination against women has been a serious problem in Nigeria. Women still grapple with an array of challenges and are marginalized despite the Nigerian constitution providing for gender equality and nondiscrimination

Women face a heavier burden of violence, and different types of bias, which creates significant obstacles in their quest for gender equality. This is frequently caused by unfair laws, religious and cultural traditions, gender stereotypes, limited education opportunities, and the unequal impact of poverty on women.

Although the government has attempted to tackle these deep-rooted issues, the pace of progress remains sluggish. Women’s representation within politics and decision-making spheres remains poor. For example, out of a total of 15,307 candidates in the 2023 general elections, only 1,550 were women. Only three women were elected as senators as against nine in the last election, and only one woman emerged as a presidential candidate.

Women are often excluded from economic prospects. Within Nigeria’s populace exceeding 200 million, a mere 60.5 million people contribute to its labor force. Among this workforce, around 27.1 million women participate, a significant portion of whom find themselves involved in low-skilled employment. Nigeria’s position on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index is a lowly 123rd out of 156 nations.

Swimming Against the Tide

A limited number of women are challenging conventional gender norms for the purpose of livelihood, stepping into roles that are male dominated in Nigeria. However, this transition is often met with resistance and negative reactions.

In 2021, Iyeyemi Adediran gained widespread attention for her exceptional mastery of driving long-haul trucks for oil companies. However, despite her remarkable skill, the then 26-year-old shared that she faced derogatory remarks for daring to break gender norms associated with truck driving—an occupation traditionally considered male-dominated.

In 2015, Sandra Aguebor, Nigeria’s first female mechanic, gained widespread attention for her all-female garages across the country. However, she revealed that her mother initially did not support her ambitions, believing that fixing cars should only be done by men.

Faith Oyita, a shoemaker in Benue State, Nigeria, is not letting patriarchal norms stop her. Despite Aba, a growing men-led market in southeast Nigeria, dominating the shoemaking industry, Oyita has been determined to make a name for herself since 2015, even though she resides kilometers away. She says she has trained over 300 other people on how to make shoes.

“When I first started, I didn’t care about the challenges that came with shoemaking. I had a deep passion for it, and I wanted to beautify people’s legs. Even though it was a skill dominated by men, I was determined to do things differently. I knew that greatness doesn’t come from convenience. In the beginning, many people questioned why I chose shoemaking. Even the man who taught me was hesitant and doubted my potential. I was the only female among all his apprentices, and many assumed that I came because I wanted to date him. Despite all the negative remarks, I never gave up,” she tells IPS.

Patriarchy Came Through Colonialism

“A lot of what is happening today is not how we originally lived our lives as Nigerian women. Patriarchy actually entered our society during the colonial era. Before colonization, both men and women were able to do things without being restricted by gender. Historically, women were involved in trading goods and services, and they could even marry multiple wives for themselves.

“However, when the colonialists arrived, they distorted our culture and, using religion, promoted the idea that men held more power. We should strive to correct this narrative. It’s unfortunate that we have been socialized to believe that men should always be in leadership positions and that women should only be in a man’s home,” says Añuli Aniebo Ola-Olaniyi, Executive Director, HEIR Women Hub.

Speaking further, Ola-Olaniyi argues that women who want to break gender norms must have a change of mindset and be ready to face challenges.

“The country that colonized us has their women driving buses and flying planes. They have progressed from where they colonized us. But Nigeria has failed to empower its women. When a Nigerian woman does something that is traditionally seen as only for men, it is seen as a big accomplishment. However, she has always been capable of doing those things. It’s just that the opportunities were not available. I don’t even think it’s a switch in gender roles. I believe that women are simply starting to realize their potential,” she tells IPS.

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Bolivian Women Fight Prejudice to Be Accepted as Mechanics — Global Issues

Miriam Poma stands in the electromechanical workshop for high-end vehicles that she co-owns in the city of El Alto, adjacent to La Paz, Bolivia. In the past, she had several jobs in the informal sector and also had to overcome a lot of resistance to working as an automotive mechanic. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
  • by Franz Chavez (la paz)
  • Inter Press Service

LA PAZ, Sep 21 (IPS) – In Bolivia, more and more women have gone from being homemakers or street vendors to joining the noisy world of engines, their hands now covered in grease after learning that special touch to make a car work. But they frequently have to put up with machismo or sexism, injustice and mistrust of their skills with tools.

Automotive mechanics is traditionally associated with masculine men wearing oil-stained coveralls. In La Paz and other Bolivian cities over the years many auto repair shops have upgraded from precarious workshops on the street to modern facilities with high-tech equipment.

Vehicles have also transitioned from human-operated nut-and-gear systems to cars governed by electronics.

But openness to women has not evolved in the same way in the profession, as it is unusual to find female mechanics.

And auto repair shops do not appear in studies on informal employment in Latin America by the International Labor Organization (ILO), although mechanic shops are very much present in the informal sector.

“At the age of five I learned about fractions through tears. My father would ask me for a fork wrench (middle wrench, in Bolivia), but since I didn’t know which one it was, he would throw it at my head,” Miriam Poma Cabezas, a senior electromechanical technician, now 50 and divorced, told IPS.

Since that incident, a mixture of anecdote and forced apprenticeship, 45 years have passed, most of them dedicated to the profession of mechanics specializing in engines and now in the electronics of high-end vehicles, in a workshop of which she is co-owner in the city of El Alto, next to La Paz, the country’s political capital.

On a busy street in the La Paz neighborhood of Sopocachi, Ana Castillo uses complex techniques to dismantle rubber tires, identify the damage, and clean and apply chemicals to fix them. At 56, she is an expert in the trade.

She charges about a dollar and a half for each repaired tire, which involves exerting vigorous effort to loosen rusted lug nuts, in order to find the puncture in worn tires amidst the fine black dust that has darkened her hands for 20 years.

“God put me here and I love it because you have to use your strength. I would go crazy sitting still,” Castillo, who completed law school, though she never practiced law, tells IPS as she quickly operates a wrench that creaks as it loosens one of the nuts, stuck hard and moldy from water and dirt.

But she does not only repair tires. She is also a specialist in rebuilding classic cars, an activity for which she is becoming very well-known.

Ana Castillo checks one of the rims she has on the sidewalk of her workshop on a busy street of the Sopocachi neighborhood in the Bolivian city of La Paz. Automotive mechanics holds no mysteries for Castillo, who is also a specialist in rebuilding antique cars. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

With a great deal of effort, Poma managed to set up her own high-level electromechanical repair shop, but before that she had spent years working as an informal self-employed worker, not only in automotive mechanics.

For her part, Castillo complained about the municipal seizure of a piece of land where she wanted to build the mechanic shop of her dreams, together with her husband Mario Cardona. A court ruling granted them the right to use the land and a city council resolution upheld it, but they still have not been given back the land.

A case like so many others

The automotive mechanics sector is just one example of those in which the participation of Bolivian women is particularly difficult, because they are seen as traditionally male professions and there is strong resistance to women breaking into the field, whether out of necessity or a sense of vocation.

The 2018 Annual Report of the UN Women agency, based on figures from the National Institute of Statistics, states that seven out of 10 women in Bolivia are economically active, work in informal conditions and lack labor rights, which makes it difficult to specifically identify how many work as mechanics.

UN Women highlights that Bolivia “is the third country in the world, after Rwanda and Cuba, with the highest political participation of women”: 51 percent in the Chamber of Deputies and 44 percent in the Senate.

But this high female presence in politics in this South American country of 12.3 million inhabitants does not translate into a boost for women in other areas, particularly business and formal employment.

The president of the Chamber of Businesswomen of Bolivia (Camebol), Silvia Quevedo, told IPS that there is no “state incentive (for women’s participation) in any particular job” and encourages “women themselves to forge their own way, based on the quality of their work.”

Camebol emerged in the department of Santa Cruz, the most economically developed in the country, and has since spread to six of Bolivia’s nine regions. It has a thousand members and its purpose, together with strengthening its institutional framework, is to influence public policies to promote equal opportunities in business.

A study conducted by the ILO on Bolivian self-employed women workers in the informal sector shows that the department of La Paz accounts for 31.8 percent of this segment, with an average age of 45 years and eight years of schooling, below the 12 years of compulsory basic education.

In the city of La Paz, 75 percent of self-employed women work in commerce, 15 percent in manufacturing and eight percent in community services. In the other two largest cities in the country, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, the proportions are similar, according to the report.

Electromechanics specialist Miriam Poma checks on a screen the problems of a high-end vehicle in her specialized workshop in the Bolivian city of El Alto, adjacent to La Paz. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Experienced hands

Miriam Poma told IPS that she began to create her own source of employment at the age of 16, on the bustling commercial Huyustus Street in La Paz, where thousands of vendors sell all kinds of merchandise. She sold shoes and handbags.

But soon after, she decided to devote herself full time to repairing Volkswagen vehicles, and ended up as head mechanical assistant to her father, Marcelino Poma, who competed in rally races until he was 70 years old.

Creativity to adapt at a young age to the opportunities of street commerce led Ana Castillo to sell pork sandwiches. She was 14 years old at the time, forced by the responsibility of caring for her two younger brothers after they had all been abandoned by their mother.

“I know how to make everything: sausages, pickles, sauces; I’m not afraid to start from scratch,” Castillo, who helped her two younger brothers earn degrees in business administration and social communication, told IPS enthusiastically.

In the formal economy, “foreign trade has a woman’s face,” said Quevedo, the president of Camebol, based on surveys of the participation of its members in export companies.

Quevedo is an economist with extensive knowledge in agriculture who specializes in exports.

In 2022, international sales of non-traditional products amounted to 9.7 billion dollars, according to the Bolivian Institute of Foreign Trade (IBCE), in a country with a GDP of 41 billion dollars.

But there are still prejudices about women’s efficiency in men’s jobs, as the two women mechanics noted.

Poma said the customers in her father’s repair shop initially did not trust her to tune their engines, and tried to keep her from working on their vehicles.

Her brother, Julio Poma, would say he had done the work, and only after the client expressed complete satisfaction would he reveal that the work was actually done by his sister.

Recently, Poma tried to pass on her knowledge to men in the field of motor electronics, but no one was interested in a female instructor who was also a racing driver in 2006. In order to attract students, she had to hire a foreign expert.

A study carried out by the Women’s Institute of La Paz, belonging to the city government, indicated the level of interest in learning gastronomy, computer technology, cell phone use and education in small business finances.

Among the non-conventional trades, the respondents called for training in masonry, plumbing and electricity, a spokesperson for the Institute told IPS. The Institute conducts training workshops for 1,450 low-income women heads of households between the ages of 25 and 70.

© Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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Taking Stock of Two Decades of Trailblazing Protocol on Womens Rights in Africa — Global Issues

Women and girls in Kenya’s West Pokot celebrate as the government cracks down on those practising harmful Female Genital Mutilation in the area. CREDIT: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
  • by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
  • Inter Press Service

NAIROBI, Aug 09 (IPS) – It promised to be the most defining, groundbreaking, and transformative protocol on African women’s rights. Specific in its approach, broad in its reach, and unique in its all-encompassing nature, covering issues such as HIV/Aids, widow inheritance and property disinheritance in a most unprecedented manner.

To halt and reverse the systemic and persistent gender inequality and discriminatory practices against women in Africa, the African Union Assembly adopted the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa 2003 in Maputo, Mozambique.

The Maputo Protocol was designed in line with the realities of the plight of women on the continent. Providing tailor-made solutions to lift women from beneath the crushing weight of a cultural system that disadvantages women from birth. Twenty years on, it is time to take stock.

“The 20th Anniversary of the Maputo Protocol is a historical advocacy moment for women’s rights advocates. It offers an opportunity to demand from African Governments real and tangible change for women and girls in their countries,” Faiza Mohamed, Africa Regional Director of Equality Now, tells IPS.

“By acceding to the Maputo Protocol, lifting reservations, fully domesticating, and implementing the Protocol, and ensuring their compliance with accountability processes. Beyond this, it signifies the generational changes over two decades and points to the need to reflect on future generations and to future-proof the Maputo Protocol and the SOAWR Coalition.”

The Solidarity for African Women’s Rights (SOAWR) is a coalition of over 80 civil society organizations, a pan-African women’s movement that pushes for accelerated ratification of the protocol in non-ratifying states while holding governments accountable to deliver for women in line with the Protocol.

Youth delegates at Maputo Protocol 20th anniversary celebrations, July 11, 2023. CREDIT: Equality Now

Mohamed stresses that the SOAWR Coalition is a remarkable testament to the power of women’s organized movements and their capacity to influence transformative policy agendas, leaving a lasting impact.

“Through its persistent efforts, SOAWR has successfully kept the protocol on the agenda of AU member states, leading to significant influence as 44 out of 55 African states have ratified or acceded to the Maputo Protocol. This achievement has turned the Protocol into a potent public education tool for women’s rights, both at the national and grassroots levels,” she explains.

“Notably, there has been substantial progress in the advancement of national jurisprudence on women’s rights, as well as in the empowerment of women themselves. Thanks to the coalition’s effective public sensitization campaigns, formerly taboo subjects like sexual and reproductive health rights, female genital mutilation, and polygamy have become open and advanced topics in various countries.”

The coalition has demonstrated how much women and like-minded partners can achieve working in solidarity. Additionally, each organization continues to push the women’s agenda forward – pushing and pulling in the same direction, to realize the dream of a society where women are fully represented in every corner of the spaces they call home.

“The Maputo Protocol comes out of the African feminist fire, and we need to keep it burning. That it is one of the most progressive legal instruments that came out of Africa. That it represents our diversity and our strength because we are not a monolith. It also represents the power of collective action and also the dream of the Africa we want,” says Nigerian-born Becky Williams, a young woman who now lives in Uganda and works for Akina Mama wa Africa.

Equality Now is currently advocating for adopting the Multi-Sectoral Approach in implementing the Maputo Protocol. The Multi-Sectoral Approach (MSA) provides a framework for convening different sectors within governments and actors outside of government in a joint effort to implement women’s rights as provided for in the Protocol.

Mohamed emphasizes that if recognized and embraced by governments and civil societies, the Maputo Protocol can be a powerful tool for change as it offers women a tool for transforming the unequal power relations between men and women that lie at the heart of gender inequality and women’s oppression.

To coincide with the Maputo Protocol’s 20th anniversary, SOAWR, Make Every Woman Count (MEWC), and Equality Now released a report titled, “Twenty years of the Maputo Protocol: Where are we now?” Providing a detailed account of progress made thus far, successes, challenges and recommendations.

Regarding rights related to marriage and child marriage, the report finds that several countries have adopted constitutional reforms related to the prohibition of forced marriage. For example, the constitution of Burundi guarantees marriage equality. The constitutions of Guinea, Malawi, Uganda, and Zimbabwe set the legal age of marriage at 18 years. AU Member States have enacted legislation on rights related to marriage.

On economic and social welfare rights, half of the African states maintain constitutional provisions guaranteeing equal remuneration for work of equal value or the right to fair or just pay. More than half of African states have laws mandating equal remuneration for work of equal value.

Regarding health and reproductive rights, almost all African states maintain constitutional provisions related to health and/or health care, and many enshrine the principle of non-discrimination based on health. Notably, six countries, including Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, enshrine rights related to reproductive health care, such as access to family planning education or reproductive/maternity care.

Group photo of the delegates at the Maputo Protocol 20th anniversary celebrations held in Nairobi, Kenya. CREDIT: Equality Now

While women’s rights have come a long way, the report stresses that there is a long way to go and makes specific key recommendations, such as the need to address the right to abortion and treat each case as espoused in the Protocol. It also suggests that the Maputo Protocol should be used to protect women and girls’ reproductive health rights and advocates that Member states remove laws that fail to protect reproductive health rights.

It advocates for the passing of family laws to protect women’s rights before, during, and after marriage and establish special courts to deal with complex marriage issues. In addition, it suggests that Governments implement regional and international treaties such as the Maputo Protocol and educate women and girls on these.

It would like to see programmes that allow young women to return to school after giving birth promoted and demands that early marriage be criminalized, and customary law is adapted so that it no longer defines what happens to women in marriage.

It asks governments to provide universal health services and insurance access, especially for pregnant, vulnerable, and/or specially protected women. It requires member states to improve infrastructure, training, and equipment for health services in rural areas.

Equally important, the protocol includes the empowerment of women and girls to realize their sexual and reproductive health rights through awareness campaigns delivered in communities and schools and wishes to see menstrual hygiene management incorporated into national legal frameworks through awareness-raising activities from more actors, especially parliamentarians.

IPS UN Bureau Report


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© Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service



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Women Recyclers in Bolivia Build Hope, Demand Recognition — Global Issues

Sofía Quispe, the president of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, finds a good haul of paper and cardboard in a municipal dumpster at the end of Avenida 6 de Agosto in La Paz, in a nighttime job that the southern hemisphere winter makes more challenging. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
  • by Franz Chavez (la paz)
  • Inter Press Service

LA PAZ, Jul 12 (IPS) – They haul many kilos of recyclable materials on their backs but receive little in return. These Bolivian women who help clean up the environment from dawn to dusk are fighting for recognition of their work and social and labor rights.

The inhabitants of La Paz, Bolivia’s political center, walk hurriedly and almost oblivious to the women of different ages silently opening heavy lids of municipal garbage dumpsters that are taller than the women themselves.

They use a homemade tool, a kind of hook with a long wooden handle, to dig through the unsorted waste, trying to avoid getting cut by broken glass, and in search of plastic containers, paper, cardboard or aluminum cans.

People walk by on the avenues and squares without looking at them, and sometimes actively avoiding them. The recyclers feel this indifference and even rejection, but they overcome it with the courage gained over years and generations, convincing themselves that they have a dignified vocation.

“People call us dirty pigs (cochinas), they humiliate us and we can never respond,” says Rosario Ramos, a 16-year-old who accompanies her mother, Valeriana Chacolla, 58, sorting through the trash for recyclable waste.

A study by the United Nations Joint Program on self-employed women workers in the country describes them generally as being “of indigenous origin, adults with primary school education. Seventy percent of them are also involved in activities related to commerce, while 16 percent work in the manufacturing industry.”

Of a population of 12.2 million projected by the National Institute of Statistics for the year 2022, 5.9 million are women. La Paz is home to 1.53 million people.

Of the total population of this Andean country, 41 percent defined themselves as indigenous in the last census, while according to the latest official data available, 26 percent of urban dwellers live in moderate poverty and 7.2 percent in extreme poverty, including most of the informal recyclers.

One of the groups of women of the Ecorecicladoras de La Paz association gather next to a municipal dumpster in a corner of Plaza Avaroa in Bolivia’s political capital, after finishing their nightly collection of reusable materials. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

On this southern hemisphere wintertime July night in La Paz, the group of women are virtually invisible as they gather around the dumpsters located in a corner of the Plaza Avaroa, in the area of Sopocachi, where residential and public office buildings are interspersed with banks, supermarkets and other businesses.

It’s a good place for picking through the waste in the dumpsters, and the women find paper, newspapers, plastic and aluminum containers. Although the volume of waste is large, each one of the garbage pickers manages to collect no more than one or two kg on one of the days that IPS accompanied different groups of the women in their work.

The silence is broken on some occasions when salaried municipal cleaners show up and throw the women out of the place, because they also compete to obtain materials that they then sell to recyclers. This is a moment when it becomes especially clear that garbage has value.

That is one of several reasons that forced the informal garbage pickers to come together in an association called EcoRecicladoras de La Paz. “There is no work for us, and they only listen to us when we organize,” says María Martínez, 50, the recording secretary of the 45 members, who also include a few men.

In Bolivia, trash is not separated into reusable and non-reusable waste in homes or offices. This task is carried out by private recycling companies, who buy the raw materials from informal waste collectors such as EcoRecicladoras.

Leonor Colque Rodríguez, 78, wearily ends her night shift collecting recyclable waste in Sopocachi, an area in La Paz, Bolivia. She has been working for 40 years as a “grassroots recycler” and is the head of her household. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Martínez, with slightly graying hair, says she comes out every evening. “I was a domestic worker until I was 30 years old. When my daughter was born I couldn’t get a job. I collected plastic bottles, clothes and shoes and sold them to the factories, but the recycling companies who pay really low prices emerged,” she complains.

It takes about three months between the initial collection and the final sale of the recyclable materials. Martínez collects the materials, carries around seven kg on her back, walks about three kilometers and patiently stores them until she has enough to sell them to the wholesaler.

“One year I collected 200 kg of scrap metal and sold it for 150 bolivianos (about 20 dollars),” she recalls. The recycling companies want to buy by the ton, she explains, with a grin, because it is impossible for them to reach that volume.

She represents a second generation of garbage collectors. Her mother, Leonor Colque, is two years short of turning 80, and has been combing through garbage dumps and trash on the streets for 40 years. On her back she carries a cloth in which she hauls a number of pieces of paper and some plastic waste.

“They should stay in school because this job is not for young girls,” she recommends, sadly, because she could not achieve her goal of sending one of her daughters to a teacher training school.

At 58, Chacolla, like almost all women garbage pickers, is the head of her household. Her husband, a former public transport driver, lost his job due to health problems and occasionally works as a welder, door-maker or bricklayer.

When she goes out to sort through trash she is accompanied by her daughter, Rosario, who explains and expands on what her mother says, calling for a change in the public’s attitude towards them and respect for the work they do as dignified, emphasizing, as they all do, that they deal with recyclable waste, not garbage.

Vests like this one identify women “grassroots recyclers” in their work of sorting through waste in dumpsters installed by the municipal government of La Paz in different parts of the Bolivian city. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

“I walk with the Lord in my heart, he always helps me,” says Angelica Yana, who at 63 years of age defies the dangers of the wee hours of the morning in the Achachicala area, on the outskirts of La Paz, five kilometers north of the city.

“Nothing has ever happened to me,” says Yana, who leaves her home at three in the morning to scrape up enough to support a son who offers fine finishing masonry services, and her sick husband.

At the age of 70, Alberta Caisana says that she was assaulted by municipal cleanup workers while she was scrounging for recyclable materials. She now carries a credential issued by the Environmental Prevention and Control Directorate of the Autonomous Municipal Government of La Paz, and wears a work vest donated by development aid agencies from the governments of Sweden and Switzerland.

She relies on her uniform and identification card as symbols of protection from the indifference of the people and aggression from local officials.

The mother of a daughter and the head of her household, Anahí Lovera, saw her wish to continue her university studies frustrated, and at the age of 32 she combines collecting plastic bottles with helping in different tasks in the construction of houses.

In the foreground, the secretary of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, María Martínez (50), together with Carla Chávez (42) and her mother Leonarda Chávez (72) take a break from sorting through waste in the Sopocachi area of the Bolivian city of La Paz. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Others, they say, sell clothes and other recovered objects in street markets, such as the famous one in Villa 16 de Julio in the neighboring city of El Alto, where used and new objects are sold in an area covering two kilometers.

Lovera’s work appears to go smoothly, but she and her colleagues describe the moment of dealing with the buyers. They deliver an exact volume and weight of products and the buyers declare a lower weight in order to pay less.

“This sector isn’t noticed by society, especially because we work with waste, that is, with what society throws away; this work is ‘devalued’,” Bárbara Giavarini, coordinator of Redcicla Bolivia-Reciclaje Inclusivo, told IPS.

One sign of the public’s recognition of the “grassroots recyclers,” as they call themselves, could be the direct, sorted delivery of the waste, which would facilitate the women’s work, she said.

Redcicla, a platform that promotes the integrated treatment of waste, has been helping since 2017 to organize them and bring visibility to their work, while fostering the delivery of waste from citizens to “grassroots recyclers” and working for the recognition of their work as dignified.

The president of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, Sofía Quispe, supports the idea of getting help from local residents in sorting materials and delivering them to their affiliates, instead of throwing them into dumpsters where they are mixed with products that prevent subsequent recycling.

The president of the women’s group Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, Sofia Quispe, walks along the central Arce Avenue in this Bolivian city in search of dumpsters where local residents throw their waste. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Quispe is a 42-year-old mother of three. Like most of her fellow recyclers, she walks about two kilometers on foot in search of dumpsters, dressed in the customary indigenous wide-brimmed hat and pollera or skirt.

On the night that IPS accompanied her, she did not find the dumpster that was usually on Avenida 6 de Agosto, probably because it had been removed and taken to another part of the city.

The impoverished garbage picker was once a skilled seamstress who worked in small family-owned factories in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Upon her return due to an illness, she was unable to raise the money she needed to buy a machine and raw materials.

She was also discouraged by the lack of interest among local residents in buying garments made in Bolivia, as they preferred low-cost clothing smuggled into the country as contraband.

Leonarda Chávez, another 72-year-old head of household, who collects recyclable materials every day with her daughter Carla Chávez (42) and granddaughter Maya Muga Chávez (25), feels satisfied because she can see her dream come true.

This month, her granddaughter earned a diploma in Business Social Responsibility, with which she completed her university education, in addition to a degree in commercial engineering and business administration, in a country where higher studies do not always guarantee good jobs.

Among the darkness and the objects discarded by people, hope is also alive. Rosario Ramos took the lessons of hard work and created her own goal: “I will study advanced robotics and prosthetic assembly,” she says with a confidence that contrasts with the group’s sad stories.

© Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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Wood Smoke Continues to Make Women Sick in El Salvador — Global Issues

Cecilia Menjivar, a tortilla maker in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, takes a break from cooking corn in a pot that is one meter high and 50 centimeters in diameter, heated by a wood stove. Many women in urban and rural areas run these small businesses, aware of the damage to their health caused by the smoke, but the economic situation forces them to use firewood, which is much cheaper than liquefied gas. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
  • by Edgardo Ayala (san luis la herradura, el salvador)
  • Inter Press Service

SAN LUIS LA HERRADURA, El Salvador, Jul 04 (IPS) – Using a few dry sticks as fuel, Margarita Ramos of El Salvador lit the fire in her wood stove and set about frying two fish, occasionally fanning the flame, aware that the smoke she inhaled could affect her health.

“I know that the smoke can damage my lungs, because that’s what I’ve heard on the news, but what can I do?” Ramos told IPS, standing next to her stove in the courtyard of her home in El Zapote, a village of 51 families in the coastal municipality of San Luis La Herradura, in the southern Salvadoran department of La Paz.

Firewood, the fuel of the poor

“I cook with firewood out of necessity, because I don’t always have a job or money to buy gas,” added Ramos, 44, referring to liquefied gas, a petroleum derivative used for cooking in 90.6 percent of Salvadoran homes, according to official data.

This is the situation faced by many women in El Salvador and other parts of the world, especially in the countryside, where dire economic conditions as well as ingrained habits and traditions lead families to cook with firewood, with negative repercussions on their health.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that in 2019 approximately 18 percent of global deaths were due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 23 percent to acute respiratory infections.

Ambient pollution, including wood smoke, plays a decisive role in respiratory diseases, especially among rural women, who do the cooking in line with the roles of patriarchal culture.

Back in 2004 the WHO warned that about 1.6 million people were dying annually from charcoal and wood smoke used in cooking stoves in many developing countries.

In El Salvador, 29,365 cases of acute respiratory infections per 100,000 inhabitants were reported in 2022, well above the 19,000 reported in 2021. Pneumonia reached 365 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the same period, and the case fatality rate stood at 13.6 percent, up from 11.4 percent the previous year.

Ana Margarita Ramos fries two fish for dinner on a wood stove in El Zapote, a coastal village located in the municipality of San Luis La Herradura, in the Salvadoran department of La Paz. Due to economic difficulties she frequently has to cook with firewood, and she fears that she might get asthma from exposure to the smoke. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Ramos showed IPS the gas stove she has inside her house, with a cylinder that lasts approximately 40 days.

But when the gas runs out and she can’t afford to refill the cylinder, she has to cook with her wood stove. In her courtyard she has a table in a makeshift shed, where she keeps the wood and a metal structure that holds her pots and pans.

Official figures indicate that 5.9 percent of households in this Central American country use firewood for cooking.

However, in rural areas the proportion rises to 12.9 percent, while 84.4 percent cook with gas and the rest use electricity and other systems.

Ramos, 44, has no steady job and as a single mother, scrambles to provide for the needs of her two children.

Twice a week she cleans upscale apartments at a resort near her home, in Los Blancos, a well-known beach on El Salvador’s Pacific coast, also in La Paz. When she does well she cleans two a day, earning 24 dollars.

Sometimes she also washes other families’ clothes.

“Right now I have run out of gas, I have to use firewood,” she said. A cylinder of liquefied gas costs between 12 and 14 dollars.

She generally collects firewood on the banks of the estuary, from the branches of mangrove trees, since hers and other poor families live in a shantytown located between the Pacific Ocean and the Jaltepeque estuary, one of the country’s main wetlands.

Poverty affects 26.6 percent of the population at the national level in this small Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants, according to official figures. But in rural areas the proportion rises to 29.6 percent, and of these, 10.8 percent live in extreme poverty.

At her house in the coastal village of El Zapote, Ana Margarita Ramos luckily has a yard where she has set up her wood stove, thus reducing her exposure to smoke, in a country like El Salvador where many women suffer from respiratory diseases due to the effects of cooking with firewood. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Cutting costs with firewood

Meanwhile in San Salvador, the country’s capital, Cecilia Menjívar runs her small tortilla-making business partly by using firewood, which she collects from tree branches around the Los Héroes community where she lives.

She also uses wood left over from construction sites and sometimes buys it as well, at a cost of one dollar for about three “rajas” or axe-cut tree branches.

Tortillas are round flat bread made from corn dough, which are baked on metal plates generally heated with the flame from liquefied gas.

But Menjívar does not use gas to cook the 68 kg of corn she uses daily to run her business, as she can’t afford it.

“That’s why we prefer firewood. We don’t like it, first of all because of the damage to our health, and also because our clothes are impregnated with the smell of smoke and the walls of the house too, they look dirty,” Menjívar, 58, told IPS.

“We do it to save on the cost, which would be very high, and we wouldn’t make any profit,” she added, while behind her the 68 kg of corn for the day rattled in a boiling pot, black from the wood smoke.

Tortillas are part of the staple diet of the Salvadoran population. Most households cook their food on gas stoves, but they don’t make their own tortillas, because it is a complex and time-consuming process.

That is why so many women, like Menjívar, go into the tortilla business to meet the high level of demand, cooking the corn on wood stoves, usually located in the open air in their courtyards.

But during the May to November rainy season, they cook the corn inside the house, in a back room.

Because of the amount of corn and the size of the pot, the improvised wood stove made of wood and a metal structure has to be set on the floor.

The tortilla business has shrunk, she added, due to the increase in the cost of corn, which climbed from 15 dollars per quintal (45 kg) to 32 dollars.

“With this business we earn enough to buy our food and other basic things, but not for other expenses,” she said.

One of Ana Margarita Ramos’ two sons, in El Zapote, a coastal settlement in southern El Salvador, stands near the firewood that is always on hand in case they can’t afford to buy liquefied gas. About 13 percent of rural Salvadoran households cook with firewood, which poses serious health risks. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Chronic bronchitis and pneumonia

Menjívar said that she fell ill with pneumonia in 2022, and she did not rule out that the cause could have been precisely the smoke she has been inhaling for decades, although she pointed out that the doctors who treated her did not inquire about it.

“Since I was a little girl I have been exposed to smoke, because my mother also used to make tortillas using firewood,” she said. “When she couldn’t find dry branches, my mom would burn anything: old shoes, old clothes or paper.”

When she got pneumonia, she had to stop working for three months, and she had to leave the business in the hands of her teenage daughter.

Burning firewood releases toxic gases and polluting particles that end up causing ailments that in medical terminology are grouped together as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pulmonologist Carmen Elena Choto told IPS. These gases include carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide.

“We also see other harmful particles, there may even be hydrocarbons, because they not only burn wood, but also dry cow dung, corncobs, paper, anything to make the fire,” said the expert.

Damage to the bronchi, or chronic bronchitis, and to the alveoli in the lungs, or pulmonary emphysema, are some of the diseases associated with exposure to smoke, including tobacco smoke, she added.

“Due to the burning of biomass (firewood and other products), the most frequent disease is chronic bronchitis,” said Choto, and older women are the main victims.

People with bronchitis have a constant cough “or wheezing or shortness of breath because there is obstruction due to mucus plugs in the airway,” she said.

Patients, she added, feel tired and suffer from dyspnea or shortness of breath from low oxygen levels, which in severe cases requires hospital care.

Menjívar began to feel these symptoms after spending years making tortillas.

“I felt very tired, I suffered from hot flashes, I was short of breath, I felt like I was having a hard time breathing,” she said.

After she was diagnosed with pneumonia, Menjívar stopped working for three months.

“That’s why I try to stay farther away from the smoke now,” she said. “But the smoke spreads through the house.”

For her part, Ramos, in her coastal village, has put her stove in the yard outdoors, to reduce exposure to smoke. She worries that she could suffer from asthma, like her sister.

A resident of the coastal hamlet of El Salamar, in the municipality of San Luis La Herradura in southern El Salvador, cooks pasta for lasagna on an ecological stove called a “rocket”, which is much more efficient in producing heat and emits less smoke. This kind of stove has been used for decades in rural communities in the country, with good results in alleviating the health risks posed by wood stoves. But they have not become widespread, due to a lack of government investment and campaigns to encourage their use. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Eco-stoves, an alternative

One possible answer to reduce exposure to smoke, especially in rural areas, is the spread of eco-stoves, which due to their combustion mechanism are more efficient in producing energy and release less smoke.

These stoves have been around for decades in developing countries, including El Salvador, but they have not yet become widespread enough to make a difference, at least in this country.

There are socio-cultural aspects that hinder the expansion of the stoves and lead to the continued use of wood-burning stoves, environmentalist Ricardo Navarro, of the Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technology, a local affiliate of the international organization Friends of the Earth, told IPS.

For example, he mentioned the practice by small farmers of placing corn or beans on bamboo or wooden platforms on top of wood stoves, so that the smoke prevents insects from eating the food.

“The problem is that sometimes we approach the issue as an energy or health problem, without considering these socio-cultural aspects,” Navarro said.

© Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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Women in Peru’s Poor Urban Areas Combat the Crisis at the Cost of Their Wellbeing — Global Issues

While cooking on one side of her wooden tin-roofed house, Mercedes Marcahuachi describes her long day’s work to meet the needs of her household and of the soup kitchen where she serves 150 daily rations at the low price of 80 cents of a dollar, in one of the settlements of Ventanilla, a “dormitory town” of Lima, the Peruvian capital. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
  • by Mariela Jara (callao, peru)
  • Inter Press Service

CALLAO, Peru, Jul 03 (IPS) – At five in the morning, when fog covers the streets and the cold pinches hard, Mercedes Marcahuachi is already on her feet ready to go to work in Pachacútec, the most populated area of the municipality of Ventanilla, in the province of Callao, known for being home to Peru’s largest seaport.

“If I don’t get up that early, I don’t have enough time to get everything done,” the 55-year-old woman tells IPS as she shows us the area of her home where she runs a soup kitchen that she opened in 2020 to help feed her community during the COVID pandemic and that she continues to run due to the stiffening of the country’s economic crisis.

Emerging as a special low-income housing project in the late 1980s, it was not until 2000 that the population of Pachacútec began to explode when around 7,000 families in extreme poverty who had occupied privately-owned land on the south side of Lima were transferred here by the then government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

The impoverished neighborhood is mainly inhabited by people from other parts of the country who have come to the capital seeking opportunities. Covering 531 hectares of sandy land, it is home to some 180,000 people, about half of the more than 390,000 people in the district of Ventanilla, and 15 percent of the population of Callao, estimated at 1.2 million in 2022.

Marcahuachi arrived here at the age of 22 with the dream of a roof of her own. She had left her family home in Yurimaguas, in the Amazon rainforest region of Loreto, to work and become independent. And she hasn’t stopped working since.

She now has her own home, made of wood, and every piece of wall, ceiling and floor is the result of her hard work. She has two rooms for herself and her 18-year-old son, a bathroom, a living room and a kitchen.

“I’m a single mother, I’ve worked hard to achieve what we have. Now I would like to be able to save up so that my son can apply to the police force, he can have a job and with that we will make ends meet,” she says.

Marcahuachi worked for years as a saleswoman in a clothing store in downtown Lima, adjacent to Callao, and then in Ventanilla until she retired. Three years ago, she created the Emmanuel Soup Kitchen, for which the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion provides her with non-perishable food.

Pachacútec, a poor settlement in the port municipality of Ventanilla, has 180,000 inhabitants from different regions of the country and districts of Lima, the Peruvian capital. The conditions of poverty and precariousness increase caregiving work, typically associated with women due to gender stereotypes. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

The community soup kitchen operates at one end of the courtyard that surrounds her house and offers 150 daily food rations at the subsidized price of three soles (80 cents of a dollar), which she uses to buy vegetables, meat and other products used in the meals.

Marcahuachi feels good that she can help the poorest families in her community. “I don’t earn a penny from what I do, but I am happy to support my people,” she says.

Her daily routine includes running her own home as well as ensuring the 150 daily food rations in the Emmanuel settlement where she lives, one of 143 neighborhoods in Pachacútec.

Various studies, including the World Bank’s “Rising Strong: Peru Poverty and Equity Assessment”, have found that poverty in Peru is mostly urban, contrary to most Latin American countries, a trend that began in 2013 and was accentuated by the pandemic.

By 2022, although the national economy had rallied, the quality of employment and household income had declined.

Mercedes Marcahuachi is a resident of Pachacútec, a large area in the province of Callao on Peru’s central coast characterized by poverty and inequality. During the pandemic she set up a soup kitchen in her home, to feed the poorest local residents in her neighborhood, which is called Emmanuel. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

In Pachacútec, in the extreme north of Callao, the hardship is felt on a daily basis.

Only the two main streets are paved, while the countless steep lanes lined with homes are stony or sandy. Cleaning is constant, as dust seeps through the cracks in the wooden walls and corrugated tin-sheet roofs.

In addition, food and other basic goods stores are far away, so it is necessary to take public transportation there and back, which makes daily life more expensive and complicated.

But these are unavoidable responsibilities for women, who because of their stereotypical gender roles are in charge of care work: cleaning, washing, grocery shopping, cooking, and caring for children and adults with disabilities or the elderly.

This is the case of Julia Quispe, who at the age of 72 is responsible for a number of tasks, such as cooking every day for her family, which includes her husband, her daughter who works, and her four grandchildren who go to school.

Julia Quispe, 72, continues to care for and feed her family, including making the long trip to the market to shop and feed her husband, daughter and grandchildren. She does so at the cost of her own poor health. But this resident of Pachacútec, a poor area near Lima, the Peruvian capital, responds that she has “never worked”, when asked. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

She tells IPS that she has uterine prolapse, that she is not feeling well, but that she has stopped going to the hospital because for one reason or another they don’t actually provide her with the solution she needs.

Despite her health problems, she does the shopping every day at the market, as well as the cooking and cleaning, and she takes care of her grandchildren and her husband, who because of a fall, suffers from a back injury that makes it difficult for him to move around.

“When we came here in 2000 there was no water or sewage, life was very difficult,” she says. “My children were young, my women neighbors and I helped each other to get ahead. Now we are doing better luckily, but I can’t use the transportation to get to the market; I can’t afford the ticket, so I save by walking and on the way back I take the bus because I can’t carry everything, it’s too heavy.”

But when it comes to talking about herself, Quispe says she never worked, that she has only dedicated herself to her home, replicating the view of a large part of society that does not value the role of women in the family: feeding, cleaning the house, raising children and grandchildren, providing a healthy environment, which includes tasks to improve the neighborhood for the entire community.

Moreover, in conditions of poverty and precariousness, such as those of Pachacútec, these tasks are a strenuous responsibility at the expense of their own well-being.

The steep streets of Pachacútec are sandy or stony, which means there is constant dust in the homes, and women have to spend more hours cleaning in this densely populated settlement of Ventanilla, a coastal municipality neighboring Lima. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

Recognizing women’s care work

“Poor urban women have come from other regions and have invested much of their time and work in building their own homes, caring for their children and weaving community, a sense of neighborhood. They have less access to education, they earn low wages and have no social coverage or breaks, so they are also time poor,” Rosa Guillén, a sociologist with the non-governmental Gender and Economics Group, tells IPS.

“For years, they have taken care of their families, their communities, they do productive work, but it is a very slow and difficult process for them to pull out of poverty because of   inequalities associated with their gender,” she says.

She adds that “even so, they plan their families, they invest the little they earn in educating their children, fixing up their homes, buying sheets and mattresses; they are always thinking about saving up money for the children to study during school vacations.”

From the focus of the approach of feminist economics, she argues that it is necessary for governments to value the importance of the work involved in caregiving, in taking care of people, families, communities and the environment for the progress of society and to face climate change, investing in education, health, good jobs and real possibilities for retirement.

“Living here makes you feel like crying but what would that get me, I just have to get over it,” Ormecinda Mestanza, a resident of Pachacútec since 2004, tells IPS. She commutes daily to the Peruvian capital of Lima to work and earn a living, in trips that take between two and three hours. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

Ormecinda Mestanza, 57, has lived in Pachacútec for nine years. She bought the land she lives on but does not have the title deed; a constant source of worry, because besides having to work every day just to get by, she has to fit in the time to follow up on the paperwork to keep her property.

“It makes you want to cry, but I have to get over it, because this little that you see is all I have and therefore is the most precious thing to me,” she tells IPS inside her wooden shack with a corrugated tin roof.

Everything is clean and tidy, but she knows that this won’t last long because of the amount of dust that will soon cover her floor and her belongings, which she will just have to clean over again.

She works in Lima, as a cleaner in a home and as a kitchen helper in a restaurant, on alternate days. She gets to her jobs by taking two or three public transportation buses and subway trains, and it takes her two to three hours to get there, depending on the traffic.

“I get up at five in the morning to get ready and have breakfast and I get to work late and they scold me. ‘Why do you come so far to work?’ they ask me, but it’s because the daily pay in Pachacútec is very low, 30 or 40 soles (10 to 12 dollars a day) and that’s not enough for me,” she says.

Wood and corrugated tin roofing are the materials used in most of the houses in Pachacútec, an area in the north of the province of Callao, adjacent to the capital of Lima, as is the case of the home of Ormecinda Mestanza, who constantly worries that when it rains her house will be flooded by leaks in her roof. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

She managed to buy the land with the help of relatives. After working for a family as a domestic for 30 years, her employers moved abroad and she discovered that they had lied to her for decades, claiming to be making the payments towards her retirement pension. “I never thought I would get to this age in these conditions, but I don’t want to bother my son, who has his own worries,” she says.

According to official figures, in Peru, a country of 33 million inhabitants, 70 percent of people living in poverty were in urban areas in 2022.

And among the parts of the country with a poverty rate above 40 percent is Callao, a small, densely populated territory that is a province but has a special legal status on the central coast, bordered to the north and east by Lima, of which it forms part of its periphery.

The municipality of Ventanilla is known as a “dormitory town” because a large part of the population works in Lima or in the provincial capital, also called Callao. Because of the distance to their jobs, residents spend up to five or six hours a day commuting to and from work, so they basically only sleep in their homes on workdays, and very few hours at that.

Guillén says it is necessary to bring visibility to the workload of women and the fact that it is not valued, especially in poor outlying urban areas like Callao.

“We need a long-term policy immediately that guarantees equal education for girls and boys, and gives a boost to vocations, without gender distinctions, that are typically associated with women because they are focused on care,” says the expert.

She adds that if more equality is achieved, democracy and progress will be bolstered. “This way we will be able to take better care of ourselves as families, as society and as nature, which is our big house,” she remarks.

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